


Undercurrent

by candle_beck



Category: Baseball RPF
Genre: First Time, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-10
Updated: 2011-08-10
Packaged: 2017-10-22 11:50:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/237713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/candle_beck/pseuds/candle_beck
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All the things that have happened, anything that's ever happened, whatever bad you've done--it doesn't matter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Undercurrent

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted February 2004.

Undercurrent  
By Candle Beck

Mulder doesn’t know this guy.

He doesn’t know this bar, because this is Kansas City and he doesn’t know too many bars in Kansas City. The one close to the hotel, the one in the airport. The one near the ballpark. He doesn’t know the names, he just knows where you can get two dollar shots and the place that stays open until four in the morning.

It’s all right, isn’t it, not to know this guy, because he doesn’t know this bar, he doesn’t know this town, either, and it seems like if he doesn’t know the most basic stuff of where he is, then it’s okay not to know this guy.

Mulder’s hands are hard and tight and wrapped up in the collar of a soft shirt, pulling, chafing against the skin, and the guy who he doesn’t know hisses low in the back of his throat, so he ducks his head and swipes his tongue across the red mark on the guy’s neck, soothing it away.

The guy tries to get a handhold in Mulder’s hair, but it is too short, there’s nothing to grip his fingers in, so the guy curls his hand around the back of Mulder’s neck and pulls his head up that way.

When they are face to face, the guy smiles and says, “You’re all right, hey?”

Mulder leans in and presses his mouth to the guy’s cheekbone, and mumbles, “What’s your name?”

The guy sneaks his hand around Mulder’s hip, inching up his shirt, his fingers cold on the bare skin, making Mulder jerk and shiver. Ducking his head around to kiss Mulder’s neck, the guy answers breathlessly, “Jacob,” and Mulder thinks that that name is too specific to be made up, he wouldn’t have believed this guy if he said John or Bill, but Jacob sounds real. Then Mulder remembers that the name he tells guys he doesn’t want to remember is Sandy (for Koufax), which is pretty specific too.

Mulder slides his hands down maybe-Jacob’s body, fitting his palms against the flat place below his ribs, and pushes him backwards, against the wall, his fingers stretched out so the tips brush against the plaster. He bites the man on the shoulder, through his shirt, and Jacob gasps, his hand on the back of Mulder’s neck holding him close.

Mulder says foggily, “I didn’t know this was that kind of a bar.”

Jacob laughs, his breath hitching, and replies with a tracing thread of sarcasm in his voice, “It isn’t, man, we don’t go in for this sort of thing in Kansas City.”

Mulder slips one hand into Jacob’s ragged brown hair and worms the other up under his shirt, icing his palm across Jacob’s stomach, and Jacob shakes hard for a second, but only a second, and Mulder says with his eyes closed, “Obviously.”

Jacob flicks open the first couple of buttons on Mulder’s shirt and noses his way down the revealed triangle of skin, his tongue marking out the line of Mulder’s sternum. His hands are linked at the small of Mulder’s back, under the shirt, and Mulder is trying to regain his balance, one hand braced on the wall beside Jacob’s head, the other hand clenching maybe too hard in Jacob’s hair, but Jacob doesn’t say anything about it, just asks in a simple, curious tone, “How come you picked me up, if you weren’t looking for this kind of a bar?”

Mulder’s already left his marks on this man, the rough evidence of this, so he tells him the truth. “You kind of look like my best friend.”

Which is more violent than he meant to be.

* * *

It’s okay, because Kansas City is in the middle of nowhere, and the Royals are the team people always forget when they’re trying to name all the major league teams, when they’ve listed twenty-nine and are scouring their minds for the last, thinking ‘I’ve got both the Canadian teams, both the Texas teams. I’ve got the Indians and the Reds. I even remembered the goddamned Brewers. What the fuck is the last one?’

It’s okay, because it’s Missouri, not Kansas.

It’s okay, because he’s not like this, not really.

It’s just something that happens sometimes, when he’s thousands of miles away from California but not homesick, because his home is wherever the team is, he doesn’t think about the Pacific Ocean when he’s a half a continent away from it, he doesn’t look at the Mississippi River and think about the Bay Bridge, he’s not unsettled by the flatness of the land, he’s not looking for hills on the endless horizon, he’s not any more out of place on the road than he is in Oakland.

It happens sometimes, on the road, because he doesn’t get recognized too often on the road, when he finds himself in that kind of bar without really seeking it out, when he finds himself in backrooms with men who have soft brown hair and hopeful eyes.

It happens sometimes.

He leaves marks on them but he knows that by the time the marks fade, he’ll have been long forgotten, so, okay. Good.

People always forget about Kansas City, no surprise that Kansas City should forget about him.

And as for all the times this has happened in Baltimore, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City (which no one ever forgets), as for all those times, it’s okay, because his name is not Mark Mulder when this happens, because Mark Mulder isn’t really like this.

* * *

Walking down the street in San Francisco, they pass a broken window, a storefront smashed open, a jagged grin glinting in the streetlight.

Mulder’s feet crunch on the shards of glass that litter the sidewalk and he stops, looking in the shattered window. There’s brown shadows and dust in there; he can’t tell if the store has been robbed or abandoned.

The glass is hard, pressing through the soles of his shoes, and Zito turns back from where he’s outpaced Mulder. Maybe ten feet between them, but Mulder is standing on broken glass and Zito is standing on smooth unmarked cement, and this is not the only thing that separates them.

“Hey. Just up ahead,” Zito says, angling his head down the road, ticking his eyebrows at Mulder.

Mulder twists his heel slightly, hears the high screech of glass against stone. “Well, shouldn’t we . . . I mean, like, something’s happened here. Don’t we tell people about stuff like this? The cops?”

He’s uncertain, he doesn’t know what the protocol is. Like once when he saw a woman crumpled on the sidewalk, her face covered in blood, not screaming or asking for help, just sitting there with the heel of her hand pressed to her forehead, her lips thin and sharp with pain, and Mulder had no idea if he was supposed to offer her a hand, ask her if she needed an ambulance or what. He didn’t even know if he should help her get to her feet; this kind of thing is not taught in school.

Zito shakes his head, his eyes weirdly shadowed, his hands in his pockets. “It’s been like that for a couple of days now. I don’t even think anybody owns that place anymore. Shit like this happens a lot down here.”

It’s the Mission District, is what he means, where heroin is sold out loud on the corner of 16th and Valencia, and the teenage drug addicts from the suburbs come to feel at home. It’s beautiful down here, the murals scrawling vibrant colors on the cracked stone walls, half the signs in Spanish, the sweep of the road up towards the stilt-legged radio tower up on the hill, something elemental trying to break free from the metal and brick. Shit like this happens a lot down here.

Mulder looks one last time into the shrouded motionless interior of the store, then shrugs, catching up with Zito, the broken glass on the sidewalk flaring under the light of the moon, blinking like a thousand eyes.

Zito’s not taking him to that kind of a bar, just a regular bar. And they’ll drink and maybe sign some autographs and maybe play some pinball if they can’t get a game of pool. Zito’s better than him at pinball, his fingers quick, his eyes needle-sharp, but Mulder will still put money down on the game, because once he loses twenty bucks to the other man, Zito will buy his drinks for the rest of the night, and Mulder will end up ahead anyway.

* * *

He doesn’t talk much. He doesn’t tell people much of anything.

Mulder can talk about baseball, sometimes that’s all he talks about for weeks on end. Splitters and sliders and two-seamers and fucking seventy-two miles an hour lollipop curves. Hitter’s counts and brushbacks and holding the runner on, backing up the plate on the throw to home, covering first on the drag bunt. He judges distances in increments of ninety feet, or sixty feet, six inches, he judges time in intervals of nine innings, he thinks ‘5-4-3,’ when he sees Chavez sitting next to Ellis sitting next to Hatteberg, he thinks ‘E-1’ when he sees Ted Lilly spill a bottle of Gatorade on the bus. He wakes up in the morning, and he thinks, ‘Two and a half games out,’ before he wonders what day of the week it is. He runs lineups in his head, each batter’s weaknesses, figuring how he would pitch every player in the game. He figures out how to pitch National Leaguers that he won’t see in interleague, too. Just in case.

But yeah, baseball. His first language. The only one he really needs. He doesn’t talk about much else.

A lot of people, they don’t think Mulder’s so bright. They think he’s just this jock, he can throw the ball ninety-five miles an hour but he couldn’t tell you who wrote ‘Great Expectations.’ They think he spent the years he should have been focused on getting an education focused on playing baseball. All right, he did focus on playing baseball, but he’s not an idiot.

He takes his time, he watches people, he doesn’t chatter away endlessly about every little thing, that doesn’t make him stupid. Just careful. Cautious. He doesn’t need to give his opinion on every topic under the sun; they have Chavez for that.

He’ll talk about baseball, because baseball can’t hurt you.

You don’t talk much, it’s harder for people to get to know you, harder for them to chisel their way into you, harder for them to become someone that you don’t ever want to leave behind.

This is something Mulder’s learned from experience.

* * *

There was a guy once, way the hell back in college, seems like a century ago, all the games and the miles and the years between then and now.

Once distances get far enough, you can’t figure them by ballpark measurements anymore. Once time stretches out long enough, nine innings means nothing, and the realization of that kills him, because he’s spent his life believing that nine innings can mean everything.

Anyway, this guy. Named Carlton, can you believe that? He was born a couple of years after Fisk waved that ball fair, and swore Game 6 had nothing to do with his parents naming him that, but still, it was the only thing Mulder could ever think of when he saw him, “Hey, Pudge, you hit any walk-offs lately?” You’d think Carlton would have gotten tired of that joke, or at least tired of being called Pudge, but he always just smiled.

They’d gotten to be friends, oddly enough, after they’d both stopped going to the one class they had together, a maddeningly boring econ seminar that took place at the ungodly hour of nine in the morning, three days a week, Mulder and Carlton running into each other on the quad one afternoon, both of them immediately asking, “Hey, did you get the notes for this week?” because that’s how you make friends in college, by not going to class, by sitting in hallways at four in the morning, keeping strange hours and never calling your parents.

Carlton was from Cincinnati, his hair as black as vinyl records and his eyes as green as spring, and he had the ironic grace of someone amused by everything, just here to watch the show, a calm thread of self-confidence in his easily-proportioned form, and Mulder liked the fuck-it glance in his eyes, the casual sneer of his mouth, the wiry recklessness like a kid leaping off a water tower into a river that was too shallow, the way he could almost tell, just by looking at the other man, that Carlton was going to die young, with the radio on, and everybody who knew him would still be telling the story years later.

Mulder was twenty and had never seen the ocean, and one night in the middle of a vast, punishing Michigan winter, he found himself in Carlton’s room, warmed through by Jaegermeister (fucking Jaeger will do you in every time), talking about how much he hated the off-season, when he had to think about something other than the game, when he had to see what life was like off the field.

He knew he was going up, he wasn’t thinking about graduate school or getting a job or even finishing his degree, he was thinking about the minors and how long it would be before he got to the Show. But in the off-season, in the blinding white of the winter, it was harder to keep this in mind.

Carlton cut him off after Mulder had rambled on for about two hours about what the Chicago Cubs were doing wrong this year, how you’d think after ninety years they’d get a freakin’ clue, Carlton asking mildly, “Hey, do you do anything but talk about baseball?”

Mulder was pretty well slammed, and anger washed through him. “Hey, fuck off, asshole, I’m not dumb.”

Carlton with his quick green eyes half-grinned. “Didn’t say you were.”

Mulder wrapped his hand around the blue plastic cup he was drinking out of (he would be twenty-five before he was drinking out of actual glasses on a regular basis), and pulled his shoulders up, scowling. “Well, fuck off anyway,” he muttered.

Carlton’s grin became full-bright, which pissed Mulder off, thinking Carlton was laughing at him, so he reached out and shoved him, hard, would have spilled Carlton’s Jaeger if Carlton hadn’t drunk it all already, Carlton falling back on the bed, skidding a little bit, messing up the covers.

See, understand, there’s nowhere to sit in college dorm rooms except the bed. Usually there’s one chair, flatly wooden or warped metal, everyone always twisting and grimacing, everyone’s back hurting from the hours hunched around the painful furniture. So when you’re hanging out, you hang out on the bed, just because that’s the most comfortable. That’s the only reason they were both on the bed that night.

Carlton propped himself up on his elbows and he was still grinning, and Mulder had always known that Carlton’s face tended to look mocking all the time, it wasn’t anything intentional, but he still couldn’t get it through his head that Carlton wasn’t making fun of him, so he killed the last of his Jaeger and tossed the cup onto the carpet, then punched Carlton on the knee, just because that was the closest thing to him.

“Hey, ow,” Carlton said, sitting up to rub at the injury, a knuckle-sized bruise already rising under his jeans. “Fucker.”

Mulder knew he was being drunk and stupid, but he wasn’t quite ready to let go of it yet, so he snapped, “Don’t fucking laugh at me, then.”

And then Carlton was moving, faster than Mulder had ever seen him move, his hands falling strong on Mulder’s shoulders, swinging his leg over Mulder’s, straddling him, pinning him to the wall. Carlton hovered there above him, looking dark and wicked, the yellow light of the bedside lamp streaming across his body but not his face, and Mulder could only look up at him, swallowing with an audible click.

“Wasn’t laughing at you,” Carlton said quietly, his palms pressing against Mulder’s collarbones.

Mulder was stronger than him, could have easily thrown him off, shoved him onto the floor, but he could feel the strumming heat of both their bodies, and he stared up at Carlton and said something he had a feeling wasn’t the truth, “I’m not fucking queer, man,” feeling halfway ridiculous, considering he had a guy basically on top of him at the moment.

Carlton’s mouth tugged upwards, and he nodded. “I know. You’re just looking for someone you haven’t found yet.”

Then Carlton had leaned down and kissed him, his mouth bright as his grin, as hot as the burn of Jaeger in Mulder’s chest, and yeah, okay, this was all right, and he decided it would be okay, because now he knew that he wasn’t queer, he was just looking for someone he hadn’t found yet.

* * *

Motherfucker, and this is what Mulder says when he can’t think of anything else to say.

Motherfucker when he is at a loss for words, when he is drunk or dragged down by jetlag, when he is pitching badly or shocked awake by his dreams.

Motherfucker when he knows that he shouldn’t be feeling this tired of everything.

* * *

On the plane to Boston, everyone else is asleep, winging unconscious through the night, and Mulder is playing the Gameboy he nicked from Chavez’s backpack, his face lit by the pale blue light of the screen.

When he was a kid, Gameboy had a dull green screen, it cast no light and you couldn’t play it in the dark. This is a new model, though, full-color, and it takes him a little while to get used to seeing Mario in his red suit. Things have changed.

His eyes are burning, and they are thirty thousand feet above Illinois, and he wonders if he looks out the window, will he be able to recognize the lights of his hometown, is South Holland down there amidst all the others? No, probably not, the only way he can even recognize Oakland is when they get low enough for him to spot the four bridges that slice across the bay, the Bay Bridge distinct linking San Francisco with the East Bay.

There is a rustling from behind him, and then Zito is sliding into the empty seat beside him.

Mulder angles a look at him, not really taking his attention away from the screen. Zito’s just a shadow next to him, vague and Zito-shaped.

“Yeah,” Zito says, and Mulder wonders if he’s picking up a conversation they have abandoned a long time ago, because Zito does that sometimes, hearkens back, sometimes it’s hard to place himself when Zito starts talking to him.

“Yeah,” Mulder replies agreeably.

“I’ma play after you, okay? Also we spend too much time on planes,” and this is two different conversations, but Zito does that sometimes too.

Mulder kills the level boss and lowers the Gameboy, his thumbs still on the controls. Zito is still vague beside him, a silhouette.

“You know what you signed up for. Better than a bus, yeah?”

Zito sighs, nods. “Yeah, yeah. Still. Feeling . . . unanchored.”

They are basically whispering, because everyone around them is asleep, which makes this feel like a secret, like something they’re hiding. Maybe they are.

Mulder walks his fingers across the leg of his jeans, not looking at the other man. “Sure. Because, yeah, sure. Unanchored. Me too.”

Zito tips his head slightly, and his eyes catch the light, strange because there is no light, but Zito’s eyes have match-flares of white in them, fluorescent. “Really?” he asks skeptically, because Zito is used to people not taking him seriously.

Mulder rubs his hand over his face, he is tired and should be trying to sleep, but Chavez wouldn’t let him play with the Gameboy all week, he had to wait until the third baseman was snoring a few rows back before he could filch it. That’s not the only reason, of course, but hey, it’s good enough.

He rests his head against the window, feeling the slight thrum of the plane’s motion, and answers, “Really, yeah. Not feeling too anchored, right now.”

Zito fiddles with the latch of the tray, but doesn’t pull it down, it’s just his deft fingers ticking on the plastic. He keeps his eyes on Mulder, looking sleepy and young. “Like, hard to say where we are right now. You know? Like, someone asks, where are you, you can usually answer, but right now, what do you say? In a plane, well, that could be anywhere. We could be anywhere right now.”

Zito’s got a tendency towards the philosophical. Mulder thinks maybe that’s why Zito’s such a good pitcher, so effortless, because Zito knows a lot of stuff Mulder doesn’t, about the phases of the moon and the stages you have to go through to reach nirvana and what it means to cut yourself adrift in search of something indefinable.

But then, Mulder knows a lot of stuff Zito doesn’t know, too.

Mulder taps at the window, a dull plastic sound. “You wanna know where we are?”

Zito’s eyes spark a bit. “Yeah,” he whispers.

Mulder reaches out, wrapping his hand around Zito’s arm, pulling him close, the armrest up between them, until Zito is close and warm, the lines of their bodies running together, their heads inches apart.

Zito just looks at him trustingly, and Mulder has to remind himself to breathe, and he turns back to the window, his arm around Zito’s shoulders, keeping him near. “See that?” he murmurs, Zito’s breath light on his cheek. “Down there, that’s where I grew up. That’s my hometown. Those lights. That’s my home.”

It isn’t, of course, or if it is that will be a remarkable coincidence, it’s just another of the sprawled patterns of lights that they’ve been flying over since they left the emptiness of the mountains and the desert behind.

Zito leans closer, his hand falling on Mulder’s leg as he tries to get a good view out the window. Mulder breathes out, long and low.

Zito shakes his head, his hair brushing Mulder’s face. “That’s not your home. Where you grew up, not the same as your home. Your home’s back there. Where my home is. But, yeah,” and he turns, smiling in the darkness, his nose maybe an inch away from Mulder’s, maybe closer. “Now I know where we are.”

And he holds there for a long moment, their faces so close, Mulder’s arm around his shoulders, Zito’s hand on his leg. Mulder cannot breathe, but, okay, that is to be expected.

Then Zito pulls away, settling back into his own seat, and he takes the Gameboy with him, hooking a grin at Mulder before he focuses on the game, and Mulder sits back, his hands trembling, and he stares out the window, down at Illinois and the place that is not his home anymore.

* * *

Mulder remembers a blizzard once, he remembers the east coast, Washington D.C., on a class trip when he was a senior in high school, sneaking out of the hotel one night with his friends, feeling young and invincible wandering the frozen city.

They ducked into a bar near the George Washington University campus, down by the monuments, Mulder going in first because he looked the oldest, he’d looked like a man since he’d been fifteen years old, his two friends trailing behind him, nervously clutching the fake IDs that ticked their ages up four years and made their home California, not Illinois.

They were in the bar for awhile, just totally thrilled to be here, this utterly forbidden place, trying to be cool, trying to look like they belonged there, drinking Foggy Bottom Ale and thinking about how awesome this was, thinking that, at this moment, they were completely free, far from home and the chaperones’ suspicious eyes, breaking the law and giddy with carelessness.

At some point, someone near the front of the bar called out, “Hey, the storm’s come!” Everybody craned around, tilted back in their chairs to catch a glimpse out the window. The snow was falling, flakes as big as the palm of a hand, coating the soaked black asphalt, blanketed heavy on the roofs of cars, dragging down the branches of trees.

There was an excited rise of conversation, grins sparking on every face, talking about how maybe the university would be shut down, maybe they wouldn’t have to go to class, and then someone yelled, “To natural disasters!” and everybody cheered and toasted to it.

Walking out into the storm a little while later, just past midnight, talking about how they would slip back into the hotel unnoticed, Mulder and his friends found themselves ankle deep in snow, a long undisturbed carpet of white spreading out around them.

The GW dorms were emptying, kids streaming out into the weather, throwing snowballs, rolling around, laughing, their voices echoing. The roads were deserted, no one out driving, just all these unlined faces, flushed with the cold, these high innocent voices, pulling on gloves and mittens and beanies over their frosted hair, running around until they were warm enough to unzip their coats and let the snowflakes slip under their collars, icy on their spines.

There were crowds of students heading down the shallow hill, south towards the river, and Mulder’s friend Paul wondered, “Where are they going?”

Ben, his carroty hair dusted with snow, darkening down into gleaming copper, grinned and said, “They’re going to the Mall.”

Mulder, a little woozy with a good humming drunk, asked, “There’s a mall open this late?”

Ben laughed, scooping up some snow to wing at Mulder, the cold exploding against his chest. “Not that kind of mall, dumbass. The National Mall, where all the monuments are. Haven’t you been listening to anything Mr. Jakes has been saying for the past two days?”

Mulder replied honestly, “No,” and then scrubbed a snow-filled hand across Ben’s head, Ben sputtering, snow in his ears and his eyes, grinning.

The three of them made a command decision to follow the crowd, tramping through the snow the few blocks down to the perfect rectangular lengths of the Mall, the Lincoln Memorial rising huge and stately at one end, the Washington Monument spearing into the sky at the other, the Capitol Building way far off, looking like a souvenir snow globe, small and beautiful.

There were packs of kids everywhere, somersaulting down hills, flopping down, spread-eagled for snow angels, building forts and snowmen, and the snow was still falling like a veil over everything, sticking to Mulder’s eyelashes, trembling when he blinked.

Ben and Paul and he immediately engaged themselves in an ongoing snowball fight, more properly an ongoing snowball war, complete with guerilla tactics and turncoats who betrayed one side by joining the other, pretty girls more valuable than the boys with the good arms, because the girls could smile and call out, “Hey, Mikey, come fight on our side for awhile!” while all the boys could do was grin dumbly and blush.

Mulder got separated from Ben and Paul at some point, thought they might have drifted onto the other team, Mulder quickly becoming a hero among these kids he didn’t know, because Mulder could peg a snowball farther and with more accuracy than anyone else, a sniper, sharpshooter.

Mulder was creeping around the edge of Constitution Lake, a small manmade pond with a hilled island in the middle, a short bridge leading out to it, carefully shaping a snowball, keeping his eyes out for the enemy, flurries of snow hanging thick around him, the wind whistling past, when he found himself on an unexpected sidewalk, having wandered off the Mall, out into no man’s land.

He looked around to get a sense of his location. He was out on Constitution Avenue, the road that ran along the Mall all the way down past the Smithsonian museums, cutting between the Washington Monument and the White House, until it funneled into Pennsylvania down by the Capitol.

Usually one of the busiest roads in the city, Constitution was deserted now, the snow so thick that he couldn’t tell the sidewalk from the street, just one smooth plane.

And out in the middle of the street, between the soft warm lights of the streetlamps, there was a boy and a girl, and they were dancing.

Mulder brushed his hand across his eyes, wiping away the damp, and when his gaze was clear he saw that it wasn’t a mistake, he had been right the first time.

They were dancing, as if they were in a marble ballroom, waltzing, sweeping through the snow, their hands linked, the boy’s arm around the girl’s waist, her hand on the back of his neck, they were dancing there in the middle of the street, the middle of a blizzard, looking sweet and perfect and young.

The boy spun the girl out, neither of them dressed for the weather, jeans and sweatshirts and torn mittens, scuffed sneakers, but they didn’t look cold, and the girl laughed as she followed the boy’s arm out, laughed as he pulled her back, the whole world around them empty, just the snow and the sky and the music that Mulder couldn’t hear, and Mulder watched them for a long time, standing in the shadows of the trees on the sidewalk, his hand numb curled around the forgotten snowball, Mulder watched them for a long time, dancing there in the middle of the street, the moon pasted up as silver as ice, a cold grin in the raffling night sky.

* * *

Sometime, four in the morning, Chavez comes out of his room to duck into the bathroom, then follows the blinking light into the living room, finding Mulder sitting there watching TV with his bare feet kicked up on the coffee table, his eyes glazed.

Chavez yawns, rubs at his eyes with the back of his hand. “You ever gonna go to sleep?” he asks, his voice thick.

Mulder flaps his hand dismissively. “Sure, yeah. In a little bit.”

Chavez talks too much and gets overexcited about arcades and newly waxed cars, basically a six-year old caught in a grown man’s body, but he’s smarter than he looks.

He studies Mulder, says quietly, “So this has been happening a lot.”

Mulder doesn’t take his eyes off the screen, though it’s just some dumb movie on cable, all chopped up with commercials and the swear words replaced with ‘gosh darn it’ and ‘forget you’ and his own personal favorite, ‘you fairy godmother’ instead of ‘you fucking cocksucker,’ because really, could those two phrases be any further removed from each other?

He asks, “What’s been happening a lot?”

Chavez comes over and sits on the arm of the couch. “You not sleeping. You being up all night. That’s been happening a lot.”

Mulder half-shrugs, uncomfortable with this line of questioning. “I sleep.”

Chavez scrubs a hand through his hair, which is an ebony crash of bed-head. “You sleep when you fall down after having not slept for three days. You sleep when you’ve got no other options.”

Mulder doesn’t tell him that sometimes he doesn’t sleep for even longer than that, sometimes he stretches out the whirring insomnia for all five days that separate his starts, only collapsing the night before he pitches, sometimes knocked out for sixteen, eighteen hours, waking up an hour before he has to be at the park.

It’s okay, because he sleeps before he has to pitch. He’s still got his priorities straight.

He leans forward to scratch his ankle, replies without looking over at Chavez, “So you admit I sleep. So what’s the problem?”

“I don’t know, man, why don’t you tell me?”

Chavez is the kind of friend everyone should have, quick and funny and easily panicked, widening his eyes in exaggeration every few minutes, always letting Mulder have a drink of his Coke, good at coming up with nicknames, his head a compendium of prank phone calls and dirty jokes, though he always ends up laughing whenever he tries to get through one, always trying to organize road trips, always throwing M&Ms at Mulder then blinking innocently, endearing. Chavez is surprised by almost everything, but he never lets anything happen to the people he cares about.

Right now, though, Mulder wishes Chavez wasn’t quite such a good friend, wishes Chavez didn’t care so much.

He tries to brush it off. “There’s no problem. I just wanted to watch this.”

Chavez looks over at the television. “What the hell is this, anyway?”

Mulder sighs, admitting, “I have no idea.”

Chavez’s voice falls serious. “Hey, man, what’s going on? How come you’re not okay?”

Mulder is used to people asking him if he’s okay, not asking him why he’s not okay. So Chavez’s question throws him off a little bit.

“I’m, um, hey, it’s nothing. Don’t, like . . . don’t worry, because it’s no big deal. Really.”

He sneaks a look over at Chavez, sees the third baseman perched there on the arm of the couch, his hands tangled between his knees, his face shadowed with concern. But it’s pretty dark in the room right now, with only the slideshow flicker of the television to illuminate them, so maybe that explains it.

Chavez sighs. “All right. I’m just . . . I’m gonna go back to bed, then.”

He stands, smoothing his hand down his T-shirt, and before he turns away, he says with boyish reassurance, “So you know where I am. If . . . well, if anything. You wanna talk, whatever. You know where I am.”

And just in case Mulder doesn’t know, Chavez points back down the hallway towards his bedroom. Mulder half-smiles at him and Chavez yawns again, his eyes all scrunched up, and heads back, leaving his door open a crack, just in case.

Mulder sits back and pulls his hand over his face, wishing he didn’t have such good friends.

* * *

One Sunday, Mulder goes to visit a friend of his in the hospital.

He doesn’t like hospitals. Hell, who likes hospitals? But, anyway, this is an old friend of his, a guy he went to high school with, before he became an All-Star pitcher and started looking for someone he hadn’t found yet. Someone he has found and now can’t have.

Old friends, the best kind.

Old friends in the hospital, possibly the worst kind.

He feels out of place in the waiting room, surrounded by people crying quietly in pain, clutching broken arms to their stomachs, makeshift bandages swaddled around their knees, smears of rust-colored blood ruining their clothes, hands pressed to chests, to heads, people breathing carefully and deep. He feels too healthy, too strong.

The woman at the admit desk has fire-red hair that he suspects is her natural color, because no one could create something like that on purpose.

“Um, hi,” he says, feeling stupid.

She slants a look at him, then turns back to her paperwork, scratching something in a quick hand. “Hello.”

Mulder hooks his thumbs on the lip of the desk and says, “I’m looking for . . . I’m here to see a patient. Sam. I mean, Samuel Peters. Is his name. Can you tell me where he . . . um, can you tell me where?”

The woman gives him a put-upon look and taps her computer keyboard. “Room 1147. Visiting hours are over at eight o’clock.”

It’s four o’clock. He wasn’t sure whether hospitals kept regular business hours, but of course they wouldn’t. People don’t stop getting hurt at five p.m.

He thanks the woman and walks down to the elevators, his hands balled up in the pockets of his coat, sidestepping wheelchairs and gurneys and people hobbling by on crutches, feeling too quick.

The hospital lights are white on white, fierce fluorescents gleaming off dangerously waxed pale tile, making his head ache, his eyes squinted against it.

He knocks on the door of room 1147, but there’s no answer, so he stands out there for a few minutes, not sure what to do. Doctors and nurses give him strange looks, just standing there in the hallway, so he gently turns the knob and pokes his head in.

“Sammy?”

His friend’s voice bounces back to him, “I’m only accepting visitors who bring me decent magazines. Be in possession of a Playboy or be gone.”

Mulder grins, Sam’s voice is as it ever is, rough and hard-edged, streaked with sarcasm.

He steps into the room, and Sam, catching sight of him, blinks in surprise, then says sardonically, a smile biting the corners of his mouth, “Well, well, well, if it isn’t the famous Mark Mulder. I am totally honored.”

Mulder fakes a glare. “Good to see you too, jackass.”

Sam grins then, his dark eyes lighting up. “Hey, those ballplayers are a bad influence on you. Who taught you such filthy language?”

“You did,” Mulder retorts, pulling up a chair next to Sam’s bed.

He tries not to let his eyes linger too long on Sam’s form, tries not to let the shock show in his face or in his voice. Sam has been carved down, his arms wasted with trenches where his muscles used to be, the bones of his wrists pressing insistently through the skin, hard as the beads of a rosary. His chest is sunken, pigeon-thin, and the line of his jaw is stark, his cheekbones in high relief. His eyes are bright, but his face is hollowed out, and his fingers are as skinny as pencils.

Sam catches the look despite Mulder’s attempt to hide it, and cuts a self-deprecating smile. “I know I’m a good-looking guy, Mark, but no need to ogle.”

Mulder blushes, ducking his head down. “Sorry,” he mutters.

“Hey, no. It’s okay. I know. Not really the picture of health, right now.”

Sam jokes about everything. Always has. He takes nothing seriously. Why did Mulder think Sam getting cancer would change that?

Mulder keeps his gaze on Sam’s eyes, because Sam’s eyes are the same. “So, how’s it going?” he asks, then wants to bite back the words, because isn’t it pretty fucking obvious how it’s going?

Sam doesn’t seem to notice, though. “It’s cool. Emily just got a new job, so you know she’s psyched.”

Emily is Sam’s wife. He isn’t wearing his wedding ring, but Mulder knows without asking that the loop of gold doesn’t fit on his finger anymore, it probably kept slipping off until they put it someplace safe.

Emily and Sam’s wedding was beautiful, a cliff down in San Luis Obispo, where Emily is from, the wind sweet and strong, white rose petals swirling down into the ocean. That was two years ago, the first Sam and Mulder had seen each other in half a decade, and when Sam met him at the tiny, two-runway airport, he had bear-hugged Mulder, lifting all six feet, six inches of him off the ground, Mulder laughing and saying, “Fucking flirt, aren’t you getting married tomorrow?”

Strange to think this is the same Sam who was once strong enough to lift Mulder off the ground. Of course, Sam already had cancer two years ago, they just didn’t know it.

Mulder nods. “Good for her.” He looks down at his hands, not sure what he should say next. Usually he would talk about the team, or the concert he went to a couple of weeks ago, a band that Sam used to play incessantly in his car when they were teenagers back in Illinois. That stuff, though, doesn’t quite seem applicable right now.

He looks up to see Sam studying him. “Hey, Mark, not to be the pot calling the kettle black or anything, but you don’t look so good.”

Motherfucker. One of the oldest friends he has is dying, and he wants to talk about how Mulder doesn’t look so good.

How can anything that has gone wrong with Mulder compare to the fact that Sam’s own body has turned on itself? How can he say, ‘Yeah, Sammy, you’re right, I’m not doing so good, I’m doing pretty fucking terrible’? How can he say that to someone lying in a hospital bed?

Mulder shrugs uneasily. Sam’s hair is dark brown, but against his white-washed skin, it looks solid black. “I’m doing all right. Not been sleeping so well, I guess. That’s all.”

Sam cocks a disbelieving eyebrow. “Still a tough guy.”

Mulder tilts a grin. “Of course.”

Sam snorts a laugh, and Mulder gives him a questioning look. Sam flips his hand through the air, rustling the IV he’s attached to. “Oh, nothing, I was just thinking about that girl Katie from high school.”

Okay, yeah. Reminiscing. That’s a safe thing to talk about, something that’s not white blood cell counts or chemotherapy.

Mulder thumbs through his mind, then asks, “Which Katie?” because he seems to remember about thirty-seven girls named Katie that they went to high school with.

Sam answers, “The one who transferred from Woodson junior year. You hooked up with her after Spring Fling.”

Mulder lifts his eyebrows as a face attaches itself to the name, and says with a cocky grin, “Ah, yes, Katie from Woodson. I remember her well. Had quite a thing for me. Not that I can blame her.”

Sam rolls his eyes. “Sure, mock the poor girl for the mistakes of her adolescence. Anyway, I was thinking about this time after you hooked up with her, and I was talking with her at this party, and she knew you and I were friends, and she was pretty drunk, I think, because she started going on about how everyone thought you only cared about baseball and there wasn’t anything else to you, and she said, she said,” Sam interrupts himself, snickering, then clears his throat, regaining composure. “She said how you were really this totally deep guy, with all this shit going on below the surface, and you just didn’t let anybody see it. Something about how you put up this wall or this moat or something. To keep people out.”

Mulder rubs at the back of his neck, saying doubtfully, “I put up a moat?”

Sam nods, rolling the paper-thin fabric of his hospital gown between his fingers. “I know, that’s what I thought. She was drunk, I guess is the excuse. Or maybe crazy. Which would explain why she hooked up with you in the first place.”

Mulder scowls, saying sarcastically, “God, I’m glad I came by to see you. You just put my spirits right through the roof, Sammy.”

Sam grins engagingly. “Hey, anytime, buddy.”

Making a come-on gesture with his hand, Mulder says, “Well, go ahead. Finish your hilarious story. What’d you tell her?”

Sam smirks. “Well, after I stopped laughing uncontrollably at the idea of you as a totally deep guy, I told her that the only thing going on below your surface was worrying about getting drafted by a National League team and actually having to take at-bats.”

Mulder leans back, crossing his arms over his chest, glaring good-naturedly at his friend. “I was wondering why she never called me back.”

“Well, now you know,” Sam says with a aren’t-I-just-the-best-friend smile.

There’s a moment of silence, in which Mulder can hear the beeps of Sam’s heart monitor, then Sam says, his voice still holding casual, “I mention it because . . . I know I make fun and all, but sometimes I don’t think she was so far off. There’s more to you than the game, Mark.”

Sam shrugs, and Mulder thinks that he should be uncomfortable with this near-display of emotion, but honesty fits him here in his hospital bed like it would fit him nowhere else, and Sam is easy as he continues, “I’m just saying, you know. You’re tough, we all know that. You can get through a lot without needing anybody else. But I’ve known you a long time, and . . . you look like hell, man. You look like you need somebody, this time. Whatever it is. So, just. Don’t be such a fucking tough guy, all right?”

There was a time when Sam would never have said that to Mulder, because Sam used to be tough, too, when they were kids they were hard and reckless and pretended they didn’t care about anything, they swore they would never need shit, no one would ever be able to make them ask for help. It was the worst thing their seventeen-year old hearts could imagine, having to ask for help.

The change in Sam, the reason Sam’s not tough anymore, it’s not the cancer. It happened before then. It was Emily that did it.

The things that made sense when they were seventeen don’t make much sense now. They stopped making sense for Sam years ago, when he met Emily, and now Mulder feels like he’s too old to still be thinking he doesn’t need anybody.

Mulder nods, keeping his eyes down, the tile black-smudged by the rubber wheels of the bed, the looping tangles of the wires that connect Sam to the beeping glare of the machines.

He hears Sam sigh above him, a loose rattling sound, and looks up, worried, but Sam only shifts him a tired smile and says, “All right, talk about baseball, I know you’re going nuts thinking you can’t.”

Yeah, Sam knows him pretty well.

* * *

He’s not gay.

He’s not in love with Zito.

He’s not living up to his potential.

He’s not doing okay.

He’s not going to feel like this forever.

It’s getting harder and harder to separate the lies from the truth in his mind, but this is nothing more than what he expected.

* * *

Mulder wakes up one day at six o’clock, and he doesn’t know whether it’s dawn or dusk.

The light out his bedroom window is soft and violet, like something out of an Impressionist painting, the sky streaked by long uneven stretches of clouds, looking like the scar on Mulder’s palm from when he was ten years old and he and his best friend had sliced open their hands with shards of glass, blood brothers, the small white thread pulling out as he grew, his palm growing broad, the scar breaking, this misplaced love line, this homemade piece of his fortune, nothing he has ever needed, nothing he has ever been able to give away.

It could be sunset or sunrise out there, his bedside clock is an old-fashioned analog with ticking hands painted glow-in-the-dark green, no way to tell a.m. or p.m., it could be the start of morning or the start of evening, because it’s the time of the year when you can’t really be sure.

Usually, he’d be able to tell what part of the day it is by how tired he is, because if it’s six in the morning, he’s only gotten maybe three hours of sleep, but if it’s six in the evening, he’ll have slept the whole day through. But he can’t tell, because he’s always tired when he wakes up these days, regardless of how much sleep he’s gotten.

Mulder stumbles out of his bed, tripping over the pillow he kicked onto the floor at some point, his mind wrapped up in something vague like cotton as he finds his way out into the hallway and staggers into the bathroom.

Flicking the switch, the light blinds him, white neon, and he squints, a raspy curse falling from him.

He brushes his teeth and splashes water on his face, washing his hands, because he feels three-days stale, stiff and aching, and it’s not until he’s heading back to bed, hoping that he’ll be able to fall back asleep, that he catches sight of himself in the mirror, realizing for the first time that he’s still wearing his jeans, though they are unbuttoned and slung low on his hips, his T-shirt from the night before hopelessly wrinkled, and he sees an inch-long scratch on his face, just below his right cheekbone, dark with dried blood, dull brown spots on the collar of his shirt.

He curiously raises his hand, touching the cut, wincing at the old pain. He tries to think of where this came from, when this happened, his dusty mind fumbling through the events of the previous night.

He remembers going over to Hatteberg’s house for dinner with a couple of the guys, the well-instilled manners of his childhood returning to him as he was faced for the first time in months with cloth napkins and utensils that weren’t plastic. It’s always a little strange, to see his teammates’ wives and families, their secure houses, their safe futures, the awareness that he’s in the middle of an aimless kind of existence, nothing certain enough to anchor him, not like his married friends who have something more than the game to live for, someone waiting for them at the end of every day.

He remembers that Ellis and Chavez had looked entirely out of place in their collared shirts, but Hudson had brought his good southern charm along with a bottle of Napa Valley wine, unfailingly polite, standing when Hatteberg’s wife stood, the rest of them following suit a second later, grinning self-consciously. Zito had fit in better than Mulder would have thought, the gleam off the silverware flashing in his hand, helping clear the table, messing around with Hatteberg’s small daughters, sitting on the floor of the living room with them while the rest of the adults dotted the furniture drinking coffee, rolling a baseball back and forth between the girls, the youngest one, with the same pale blond hair that had once sprawled like a crash of straw atop Hatteberg’s head, throwing her arms around Zito’s shoulders and begging for a piggy-back ride, Zito grinning and rising to his full height, the little girl’s laughter like bells, saying, “You’re taller than my daddy!” as she inspected the world from this new vantage point.

After they’d left Hatteberg’s, Mulder remembers going to a bar, maybe three or four bars, and that’s where it starts to get hazy. He either stopped checking or stopped registering the time after Ellis had said, “Hey, let’s go to that cookie place on Telegraph, they’re only open until one,” which was a half an hour away at that moment, and that is the last that Mulder remembers knowing what time it was.

He doesn’t remember when he might have gotten this scratch on his face, he has no idea, it must have taken place in the still black-out haze that encompassed hours of the night.

He goes back into his room, trying to determine whether it has gotten darker or lighter out there, but he still can’t tell, and he decides he doesn’t really care as he picks up the phone and taps in a number he’s had memorized for years.

“’Lo?” comes the sleepy reply after several rings, and Mulder thinks maybe that means it’s six in the morning, but then remembers that Zito always sounds pretty sleepy on the phone, like he’s just been pulled out of a dream.

“Hey,” Mulder says, sitting on the bed to better shimmy out of his jeans one-handed.

“Hey, man, ‘sup?” Zito says, sounding happy to hear from him.

Mulder kicks his jeans away, the thick rustle of denim, and asks, “What the hell happened last night?” running his thumb along the scratch, crusted rough.

Zito breathes out a laugh. “You know, Mulder, the first sign that you’re drinking too much is when you can’t remember drinking too much.”

Mulder rolls his eyes. “What are you, my AA sponsor now?”

Mulder can hear Zito’s grin. “No, just the guy you call when you don’t know what’s happened.”

The number of things that have happened that Mulder doesn’t know, doesn’t understand, is astronomical, and he wonders if Zito will be the one to explain it all to him after everything has come to an end.

“So, what happened? I remember dinner, and possibly . . . going to Berkeley for cookies?”

“Yeah, Ellis kept saying ‘snickerdoodle’ and then laughing hysterically, so we figured the only way to shut him up would be to get him a snickerdoodle.”

Mulder half-smiles, smoothing a hand over his head, looking for other injuries, trying to assess the damage. “That seems like a smart move on our part.”

“If only ‘cause you were about to kill him and then try to explain to Beane why we’re short a second baseman.”

Mulder has a déjà vu recollection of making such a threat, his soaked mind picking through his memory, trying to separate dreams and fantasies and what is true.

“What happened after that? I mean, I’ve got this cut on my face,” Mulder says, scrunching up his eye to feel the torn skin pull tight.

Zito sounds surprised. “You don’t remember that?”

Mulder sighs, leans back against the headboard, pulling his legs onto the bed, abstractly pleased that he’d at least managed to get rid of his shoes before passing out, no smears of dirt on the sheets.

“Would I be asking if I remembered?” he questions, looking out the window, thinking that maybe the light is a little paler, a little more watered-down. Or, wait, no, now it looks dimmer, darker, like it’s being swallowed up. Fuck, he can’t tell. He should stop trying.

Zito launches into the story. “Well, after the cookies, we went to that place on Shattuck, you know, the one that’s open late? But then Chavez did something to the jukebox . . . I’m not sure what . . . something about wooden nickels? And we got kicked out. You were pretty toasted by then, I guess. I was half-carrying you for like three blocks before you remembered how to walk, and let me take this opportunity to suggest that you either lose some weight or learn how to hold your liquor, because you are one heavy son of a bitch.”

Zito’s voice is light, tinged with laughter so that Mulder won’t be insulted, but Mulder’s capacity for offense is overwhelmed by his regret that he doesn’t remember Zito’s arms wrapped around him, keeping him upright for three blocks, he doesn’t remember any of it.

“Anyway,” Zito continues. “Someone got the bright idea to cut across the campus, trying to get to that cantina on the west side, you know? And we’re ducking through these bushes, I don’t even know where we are, it was dark as hell, and suddenly you’re swearing like you’ve just been lit on fire or something.”

It’s a strange metaphor, but Mulder knows it to be entirely accurate, his tendency towards profanity never so extreme as when he is surprised or in pain.

“So I kind of, you know, pull you out of the bushes, ‘cause you’re, like, punching them, right? And I get you out on the sidewalk, under the light, and you got this tough scratch right under your eye, bleeding all over your face, making you look like . . . I don’t know what. Like something bad.”

Mulder lifts his hand, touches the spots of blood on his collar. Zito’s voice is edging towards disturbed as he recounts the incident, and Mulder remembers seeing Zito pull off his jersey down in the trainer’s room after he’d left the game, revealing a ragged cut that stretched across his stomach, curling around his side, Mulder all at once stunned and terrified to see Zito bleeding, wanting to press his hands against the gash, wanting the power to heal. He wonders if that’s how Zito had been the night before, pulling Mulder into the light, seeing the blood on his face.

Zito regains some of his normal tone as he finishes, “Ellis, you know, he’s such a punk when it comes to blood, he couldn’t even look at you, but we got you cleaned up pretty well, Chavez said he’d make sure you put a Band-Aid on it today. Oh. Go put a Band-Aid on it, if you haven’t yet.”

Mulder grins. “Yes, mom.”

Zito rolls his eyes. Mulder can actually *hear* him roll his eyes, that’s how well he knows when Zito’s exasperated with him. “Whatever. See if I reconstruct any more nights for your ungrateful ass.” He pauses, then says, “That’s how it happened, though. Just cutting through some bushes. It’s not too bad, right?”

Mulder yawns, shaking his head. “Nah. It was just weird, to wake up with this thing on my face and not know how it got there.”

“Yeah, I imagine.” Zito still sounds sleepy, and warm. Mulder tries to picture him, slouched across his couch, sitting in his kitchen with one leg kicked up onto an empty chair, maybe still in bed, like Mulder is.

Mulder is about to let Zito go, the mystery solved, but then he remembers. “Oh, hey, Zito. What time is it?”

“Um . . .” He can hear Zito shift to get a glimpse of the clock. “Six fifteen.”

“Morning or evening?” Mulder asks.

There’s a long pause, then Zito answers, his voice slow, “You don’t know?”

A slight note of worry in Zito’s words, but Mulder doesn’t think much of it, because pretty much everybody is worried about him, these days.

“Once again, would I be asking if I knew?”

There’s another pause, then Zito says, still worried, “It’s six in the morning, dude. It’s sunrise.”

“Oh,” Mulder replies, seeing the light move across the wall, deciding that, yeah, Zito is right, it’s definitely getting brighter. “Cool. Now I can get some more sleep.”

“Mulder-” Zito begins, and Mulder hears the question that everyone has been asking him, if he’s okay, why isn’t he okay, so he cuts Zito off.

“Thanks for clearing that up for me. Sorry if I woke you.”

Zito takes his time, like he’s got to smother the questions he’d been about to ask, then sighs, saying, “It’s okay. I was just . . . you know, sleeping. But it’s okay.” Zito hesitates, before asking, “Hey, you wanna do something today? I mean, like, after we both wake up again?”

Mulder closes his eyes, slips down on the bed, tunneling against the increasing sun. “Sure,” he answers, his voice only a little hoarse. “I’ll call you, okay?”

Now he can see Zito, under that mess of blankets he has on his bed, burrowed, the low sound of their conversation the only thing in Zito’s dark bedroom world.

“All right. Sleep good, man,” Zito says easily, and Mulder has to bite the inside of his cheek, because it almost sounds like Zito is right there beside him, like it is perfectly natural that each other’s voices are the last thing they hear before they go to sleep.

“You too,” he manages, and hits the button to hang up, reaching out to clatter the phone back onto the hook, then pulls the covers up over his head, trying to imagine that it’s just because he doesn’t want the growing light to seep into his eyes, though in the part of his mind where he doesn’t lie to himself, he knows that what he really wants is somewhere quiet and shadowed where Zito’s voice can be more real in his memory than it is in his real life.

* * *

Mulder stopped getting into bar fights when he was in the minors.

It wasn’t, okay, it wasn’t some big thing. It wasn’t like he went out every weekend looking for someone to pound on, looking to get pounded. He didn’t need to wear his bruises like a badge of honor, he didn’t think the scars on his knuckles and the unevenly healed rift in his collarbone made him look cool or something.

It wasn’t like that.

It was just, he would be out at a bar, with some friends, and someone would start giving them shit, maybe for being college boys, maybe for being ballplayers, they could always find a reason. And he couldn’t back down, you know. What would that say about him, if he raised his hands in appeasement and said, “Hey, we’re not looking for any trouble. Let me get you guys a round”? What would it say about him if he just walked away?

So he fought, a soft haze around his mind, thinking distractedly that these punks must be as stupid as dirt, giving him shit. Couldn’t they *see* him? Didn’t they notice that the guy they were going up against was six and a half feet tall and on his way to being a professional athlete?

Hell, they were drunk. And Mulder had always looked like an asshole.

End enough nights bleeding on the asphalt, wake up enough mornings with one eye swollen shut, anyone would start to wonder if this is really the best way to spend his free time.

But he won, most of the time. And if he didn’t, he couldn’t really remember it the next day, because he would keep fighting long after he started getting beat. No one ever claimed he had the best judgment or self-preservation instincts.

Anyway, it wasn’t until he was in the minors, years of split lips and broken noses and cauliflowered ears in the muscle memories of his hands, that his manager called him into his office and sat him down.

His manager that year was a legendary hardass, his face stony, his eyes blank steely gray, his hands thick with calluses, and he had glared at Mulder, saying shortly, “I called you in here to tell you to stop being such a fucking idiot.”

Mulder blinked, raffled through his mind trying to figure out what he’d done. He couldn’t think of anything in particular, so he asked cautiously, “What do you mean, skip?”

His manager shot back, “I’ll tell you what I mean, rook. You got the chance to go all the way, all the fucking way, and you’re spending your time getting your ass beat up by drunken rednecks in two-bit dives. That’s fucking what I mean.”

Mulder tried to surreptitiously tuck his bruised left hand behind his back, but his manager was having none of it. “Perfect example, right fucking there. I saw your hand this morning, that’s your goddamned pitching hand. What the fuck were you thinking?”

Not giving Mulder a chance to answer, he continued, biting off the words, “You ever think what would happen if you get beat so bad you miss a start? Not even just that, you wouldn’t be the first guy in history to get blinded by some fucker fighting dirty. The club’s got a lot of money invested in you, Mulder, and no one’s going to take it too easy if they find out their future star is fucking worthless because he couldn’t hold his own against some random fucking brawler!”

Though he knew it was hopeless, Mulder tried to defend himself, saying weakly, “I can . . . I hold my own. I never get beat that bad. I never fight before I gotta pitch. I’m not stupid.”

His manager sneered. “Yeah, you are fucking stupid. You pitch every five days, that means every single night is before you pitch, do you fucking get that? You come in here with bruises one more time, you’re gonna get re-acquainted with the bus leagues, and I’m not fucking around.”

He paused, and Mulder tightened his jaw, trying not to glare back at him. Who the fuck did he think he was, thinking Mulder couldn’t hold his own against soused cowboys?

His manager continued, his voice still hard but with some of the anger dragged out, “Whatever the fuck you’re fighting, kid, don’t do it on my time. That’s what the off-season is for. Now get your ass out on the field.”

So Mulder stopped fighting. Not to say he totally agreed with his manager’s reasoning, but he really didn’t want to get sent back to the bus leagues.

The scars he still has, he tells people he used to go camping a lot when he was a kid. You get a lot of cuts and scrapes, camping. A lot of scars. He’s not ashamed that he used to fight, but he was never doing it so that he’d have badass scars to show off.

If people never see you fight, if they only see your scars, then they’ll think you lost a lot. They’ll think you weren’t very good at it. Mulder was really good at it.

Sometimes he misses it.

* * *

One night Mulder goes over to Zito’s place to break in Zito’s new DVD player, which Zito is inordinately proud of.

First thing Zito says to him when he opens the door is, “Special features, dude.”

Mulder smiles, standing there in the hallway holding a crinkling grocery bag with a six-pack and a mess of chocolate bars in it. “So I was promised,” he says.

Zito steps back to let him come in, and waves around the plastic DVD case. “Director commentary, deleted scenes, behind-the-scenes featurette . . . the hell is a featurette, I wonder?”

Mulder heads into the kitchen, putting the beer in the refrigerator. “A feature, I guess, except shorter. But I suppose we’ll have to watch and see.”

Zito grins at him, and Mulder wants to brush the hair off his forehead. “What did you bring me?”

Mulder rolls his eyes. “You’re like a toddler, you know that?”

Zito ignores this, digging in the bag, laying out all the chocolate bars in a row on the counter. He nods decisively, “All right, this is cool. You can stay.”

“Gee, thanks.”

Zito gathers up the cache of candy and goes into the living room. Mulder can hear the flop of his full-body sprawl onto the couch. Zito always does that, throwing himself onto furniture, letting gravity thump him down. Mulder’s never seen a chair or couch give out under the assault, but he’s always half-waiting for it.

He pulls two of the beers out and joins the other man, picking up the DVD case to see what’s on the agenda.

Zito’s got weird taste in movies, same as in everything else. He’s got a bunch of the standards, The Godfather, Bull Durham, Die Hard, but then mixed in with these he’s got black-and-white comedies from sixty years ago and cult French films that Mulder knows he doesn’t just have around to look college-educated, because Zito wouldn’t know pretension if it knocked him upside the head.

Mulder’s pretty used to Zito being unpredictable. Keeps him on his toes.

They watch Lethal Weapon with full audience participation, tossing comments at the screen and at each other, both of them knowing the movie like the back of their hands, speaking perfectly on cue with Gibson and Glover, and then have a spirited debate about which of the two of them is the sidekick in their friendship.

“Dude, it’s obviously you,” Zito says, nudging Mulder with his knee, which Mulder doesn’t mind as much as he pretends to. “I mean, I’ve got the fan clubs and the cool hair.”

Mulder rolls his eyes, draining the last of his beer. “You mean you’ve got crazy people who obsess about you and your barber’s blind.”

“Jealous,” Zito grins, and Mulder is thinking, motherfucker.

“Whatever,” he replies, trying to keep his eyes on the television.

They start Office Space, universally agreed to be the greatest movie of all time, a fact that might be belied by Zito nodding off in the middle of it, but that shouldn’t be taken to mean much, because it’s closing in on two in the morning and Zito has already seen Office Space seven hundred times, anyway.

Mulder lowers the volume a little bit when he notices that Zito’s breathing has become deep and regular, his chin snug against his chest, his eyes closed and his features pulled smooth.

It’s good enough, to sit there with Zito sleeping next to him, it’s good enough. It’s more than he hoped for.

At some point, Zito starts to tilt, starts to angle towards him, and Mulder holds deathly still, his body strung tight, not wanting to wake the other man up. At first, it’s just Zito’s head inches away from him, his messy hair brushing Mulder’s shoulder. Then it’s Zito’s leg up against his, a subtle shift closing the space between them, and Mulder swallows, tries to breathe.

When Zito finally tilts far enough to press his nose against Mulder’s arm, he snuffles in his sleep, and turns his head, resting his cheekbone on the hard ridge of Mulder’s shoulder. It’s not very comfortable for either of them, their pointy bones grinding together, so Mulder very carefully draws his arm out from between them, inch by inch, millimeter by millimeter, taking a good five minutes to extract his limb, freezing whenever Zito murmurs or jostles, and though he wants to close Zito up in the circle of his body, he settles for stretching his arm along the back of the couch, and Zito finds a new pillow in Mulder’s chest, which he burrows against like they have been doing this for years.

This is a dangerous game.

Mulder is scared to breathe, scared that he will have to cough or get an itch. He doesn’t want to do anything that might stir the other man, he doesn’t want this to end, not just yet.

Zito’s hair tickles Mulder’s chin, and he holds himself back from pressing a kiss to Zito’s forehead, concentrates very hard on Zito’s warm slow breath through his shirt.

After twenty minutes of playing the statue game, Zito’s hand comes up dreamily to rub at his nose, and then his eyes blink open, blurry.

“Yeah, hey,” Zito mumbles, peering up at Mulder through half-closed eyelids.

Mulder tries to clear his throat as quietly as possible, because Zito is still most of the way asleep. “You fell asleep,” he says softly, as an explanation.

Zito’s eyes drift shut. “No, didn’t,” he replies, rubbing his cheek against Mulder’s chest. “M’up.”

Mulder breathes out a low laugh. “Sure.”

“Not asleep,” Zito insists, but his voice is floating, fuzzy.

Mulder lets his arm slip down to curve around Zito’s shoulders, barely able to believe this is happening. Zito sighs comfortably, tucks himself in.

Mulder stares unseeingly at the television and says with his voice hoarse, “Don’t drool on me, okay, dude?”

“Yup,” Zito says, and promptly falls back asleep, his arm snaking around Mulder’s waist, and Mulder thinks that he will be able to feel the terrified muscles jumping in Mulder’s body, but he doesn’t wake up again, he seems to have found a good place and has no intention of leaving anytime soon.

It’s more than Mulder hoped for.

* * *

So they fall asleep like that, kind of wrapped up in each other, kind of hanging on.

Mulder keeps trying to tell himself to stay awake, enjoy this while it lasts, don’t miss a moment of Zito’s arm slung across his stomach, Zito’s forehead just barely touching the skin high on Mulder’s chest where his shirt collar is open, Zito whispering things into his shirt. Don’t miss a moment of this.

But it’s late, okay, and it’s been awhile since he last slept, and he’s been waiting for this for a long time. Well, not this exactly, but it’s good enough. It’s more comfortable than he’s been in years, more at peace than he ever thought he’d get.

So his eyes drop heavily, and his body slowly unravels its tension, molding to Zito’s form, and his head lolls back against the couch, and the arm around Zito’s shoulders slips down his back, his hand curving around Zito’s hip, and his other arm rests on top of Zito’s stretched across his stomach, Mulder’s fingers gently curled in the crook of Zito’s elbow.

They sleep for a long time, the television fuzzing away into static, the street noise sinking away as the bars close and people stagger home, the city’s fierce adrenalized neon screaming silently across the wall through a crack in the curtain, smears of red and blue and the howl of a siren going by.

When Mulder wakes up in the cold creeping pale of dawn, it’s to fingers lightly touching his throat, like someone checking his pulse.

He takes a moment, looking up at the ceiling, thinking ‘that’s not my ceiling,’ though he doesn’t know how he knows this, because all ceilings look the same, and he’s aware of something soft and solid half-blanketing him, and he’s aware that he’s happy for some reason, he has woken up happy for the first time in months, maybe in years, but he doesn’t know why.

He pulls his head up, his spine cracking, and the fingers on his neck draw away, and he looks down to see Zito still sprawled against him, still tucked under Mulder’s arm, and Zito is looking up at him, his gaze foggy, his hand hooked in the open vee of Mulder’s shirt.

Mulder’s throat is dry, his tongue rough, and he swallows a few times before he says quietly, “Hello.”

Which isn’t exactly the wittiest opener in the history of conversation, but fuck, circumstances are a little exceptional at the moment.

Because a lot depends on the next few minutes, possibly everything depends on it. Whether Zito will be awkward or embarrassed or angry, whether Zito will snap, “What the fuck are you doing, man?” as he shoves off of Mulder, whether Zito will finally understand about Mulder and start looking at him with pity, fumbling out humiliating stuff like, “I’m flattered, but I’m not-” whether Zito will never touch him again, whether Zito will stop meeting his eyes and smiling, whether Zito will be offended or disgusted, a lot fucking depends on the answer to these questions.

But Zito just keeps his hand lightly pulling down on Mulder’s shirt, and doesn’t sit up, and Zito says, “Hi,” same as always.

They look at each other for awhile longer in the powder blue light of dawn slipping through the room, and Mulder wonders if he should lean down, he wonders if Zito would let him.

Mulder still doesn’t know what’s going on, he still doesn’t know what to do.

And Zito’s eyes are shifting, flickering, more colors in there than Mulder has ever seen before, Zito’s eyes are dashing uncertain and then dark and then excited and then uncertain again, and that’s where they stay, uncertain.

Zito clears his throat, his gaze skimming downwards, looking at his hand on Mulder’s chest for a moment, blinking at it, and then he hastily takes it away, half-sitting up, and he says, “Cap’n Crunch.”

Mulder is cold and bereft as Zito moves away, and he almost moves to tug the other man back, he almost takes advantage of his arm still around Zito to drag him close again, but instead he just pulls away and asks, “What?” his mind gone chaotic, anarchic, not understanding anything.

Zito rubs at his leg, stamping his foot on the ground. He keeps his eyes down so that Mulder cannot see if it’s still uncertain in there. “For breakfast. Yeah, breakfast. My leg’s asleep. Ow. Also, ow. No more walking for me, I guess. Cap’n Crunch, you want?”

He shifts a nervous grin to Mulder, and then stands without waiting for an answer, limping off on his dead leg, disappearing into the kitchen.

Mulder sits there for a minute longer, resting his hand high on his chest where Zito’s head had been.

When he gets to the doorway of the kitchen, Zito is moving around, pulling milk and orange juice from the refrigerator, clattering a couple of bowls onto the counter, poking at the coffeemaker.

Mulder watches him for a moment, having utterly no idea what the situation calls for. Do you talk about something like this? How in the hell would you go about talking about something like this?

‘Yeah, dude, we definitely just spent the night curled up together on your couch, and it seems like maybe neither of us minded that much, and I’d kinda like to do things to you that would kill us both and send us straight to hell, but I don’t really know, you think that’s a good idea?’

Probably that wouldn’t go over so well.

Zito isn’t looking at him, and Mulder doesn’t think he can stand being around Zito if the other man isn’t going to look at him, especially not since he suspects that if Zito does look at him, or talks to him, Zito will say stuff like, “That was weird, let’s not do that again,” which would make the apocalypse that is Mark Mulder’s existence official.

Mulder clears his throat and runs his hand down over his shirt, smoothing out the wrinkles, and says, “So, listen, I’m gonna take off, I think.”

Zito’s head snaps up, and his face flashes dismay for an instant before he composes himself, saying fumblingly, “What? I mean, why? I mean, um, you don’t . . . you don’t have to. Um. I made breakfast. Look, see?”

He waves his hand at the two bowls and the box of cereal. Mulder smirks, the expression feeling lost on his face. “Slaved over a hot stove, huh?”

Zito shrugs, his mouth quirking slightly. “It’s the kind with crunchberries in it,” he replies, like this is an enticement that no one can turn down.

Mulder scratches at his arm, aware that he’s fidgeting, but he can’t quite stop, he can’t quite make himself be still.

He’s standing in the doorway, half-in, half-out, and Zito is standing facing him across the room, a coffee mug in his hands, his eyebrows tilted upwards questioningly, his face hopeful and scared, a familiar expression of Zito’s that Mulder has never seen on anyone else’s face.

Mulder looks down at the floor, and says blindly, “Just . . . I’m gonna . . . you know, I’m gonna go. Thanks for, um. Thanks for having me over? For making breakfast. Thanks.”

He turns away, and he can’t believe it, he can’t believe he’s doing this, he’s walking away, he’s leaving Zito, how could he do this, he doesn’t know what Zito wants, he never asked, Zito could want anything, everything, he never asked, he’s walking away, and he can’t believe it.

This is something he will regret for the rest of his life.

Mulder knows that for sure.

And then just as he reaches for the doorknob, Zito’s voice behind him, high and unsure, “Mulder, hey.”

Mulder wraps his hand around the doorknob, feeling the button of the lock press hard against his palm, and he keeps his eyes down, he doesn’t turn around, and he answers, his voice shivering to remain casual, “Yeah?”

There’s a pause, and then a bare whisper, “Mulder, fuck, don’t go.”

Mulder’s whole body shakes for an instant, his hand rattling on the knob, and he turns, slowly, the dim early morning light somehow searing into his eyes, Zito standing there with his hand up on the wall, staring at him like he’s never seen something so fascinating.

Zito says, his voice scraping and rough, “Seems like . . . seems like it might be a thing. Like maybe we should talk?”

Mulder focuses on Zito’s forehead so that he won’t have to look the other man in the eyes. Mulder is sure that his whole heart is scrawled across his face, and he is terrified of seeing Zito’s reaction to that. “Talk about what?” he plays dumb. He’s pretty good at that.

Zito sighs, confused and impatient, running a hand through his hair. “I don’t . . . if there’s something going on, okay. Okay, you should tell me.”

That doesn’t exactly sound like Zito’s about to confess his undying love for Mulder and then jump his bones. No, that sounds a lot more like Zito’s trying to be a good friend, trying to help him through this, help him get over this.

Motherfucker, and Mulder wishes with everything in him that Zito didn’t want him to get over this.

Mulder shrugs, trying to make his face unreadable, though he feels like everything is bleeding out of his eyes, streaming out, scouring. “I think I can be fucked up without your help,” he says, crooking a grin so that Zito doesn’t take offense.

A smile whisks across Zito’s face, then he answers seriously, “You’re not fucked up, dude.”

In his head, Mulder hears Carlton saying, “You’re just looking for someone you haven’t found yet,” and he wonders if he says that to Zito, will Zito say, “Yeah, you have,” and come over and put his arms around him?

He can’t imagine it.

Mulder tries to keep his voice light, a humorless glint in his eyes, “I don’t know, man, I feel pretty fucked up, right now. But, hey, maybe I just needed a second opinion.”

Zito steps forward, making Mulder’s heart catch, but then Zito stops, looking out of place there in the middle of the room, and Zito says quietly, “I can be fucked up too. If you . . . if you need me to be. If you want me to be. We can be fucked up together.”

And Mulder thinks that Zito has no idea what he’s offering, they’re having two different conversations, as happens when Zito is involved, this is just Zito being a good friend, letting Mulder know that he’s there for whatever Mulder needs, not having the slightest clue about what it is that Mulder needs.

There is something falling in Mulder’s chest, there is something spiraling downwards, and he’s not sure how much longer he can stay on his feet, he’s not sure how much longer he can keep from doing something that Zito will end up hating him for.

Give Mulder enough time, and he will ruin absolutely everything that matters.

Mulder stares at Zito, and says helplessly, “You’re my best friend, Zito, you know that?”

And then Mulder turns and walks out, and it’s not until he’s two blocks down, smothered by the stark painless morning, that it occurs to him that there is more than one way to ruin something.

* * *

All right, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He knows.

Stupid son of a bitch.

* * *

There was this time, when Mulder was a kid, maybe eight years old, maybe nine, when he went to Chicago with his parents for the weekend.

He spent the first day sulking, because he was missing Little League to be here, and he didn’t care about the streaking heights of the buildings, the tallest he’d ever seen, or the clamoring rush of the city, everyone walking and talking faster than people did back in his town. His mom kept trying to cheer him up, buying him ice cream and letting him climb all over the modern art sculptures in the sprawling plazas of an office complex, despite the slanted looks of irritation the people who worked there kept shooting him, the muttered comments that this wasn’t a place for damn kids.

He was still in a bad mood on the second day, when his dad kept smiling secretly and wouldn’t tell him where they were going that afternoon, making Mark sulkier and more sullen, thinking darkly that his team was probably winning without him right at this moment, probably already deciding they didn’t need him anymore.

And then the cab dropped them off on West Addison, in front of a place young Mark had never been before but knew as well as he knew the sandlot behind the high school back in South Holland.

Wrigley Field.

Mark yelped and scampered out onto the sidewalk, staring up open-mouthed at the famous red neon, the huge marquee proclaiming in gleaming letters: ‘TODAY, 2:15, CARDINALS VS. CUBS.’

He grabbed his dad’s hand, dragging him forward, pointing joyfully, “Look, Dad, it’s Wrigley Field! Dad, look, look!”

His dad had ruffled his hair and laughed. “I know, buddy, I was the one who bought the tickets.”

Mark stopped dead in his tracks, gawking at his dad. “You mean we’re going *inside*?” he asked in astonishment, because he would have been perfectly happy just to caper around outside the stadium and hear the roar of cheers from within.

His dad pulled two tickets out of his coat pocket and solemnly placed one in his son’s hand. Mark stared down at the magical scrap of paper, the Cubs logo in one corner, the afternoon’s match printed clear as day right in the center.

“Oh, man,” he whispered, then looked up with a huge gap-toothed grin, throwing his arms around his dad’s waist, hugging the air out of him.

But that wasn’t the part of the trip that Mulder remembered best.

Strange, that his first time in a major league park, while certainly engraved on his memory, wasn’t the thing he remembered best. It happens like that, sometimes.

Later that night, after the game (Cards 2, Cubs 4, and Mark decided sometime around the fifth inning that no matter what happened, he’d play baseball until the day he died, his dad nodding seriously as Mark told him this, replying, “That’s the best life plan I’ve ever heard”), after they had met up with Mark’s mom, they were heading back to their hotel from dinner when the storm hit.

It was the kind of catastrophic, unpredictable summer storm that came out of nowhere, fell on the city like an avenging angel, the sky just breaking open suddenly and dousing everyone with harsh gray rain and gale force winds that blew people into walls, almost taking them off their feet.

There was a fantastic rip of lightning, blaring the whole world white for a moment, then a tremendous crash of thunder, the loudest thing Mark had ever heard, and then the rain was coming, hard and fast and unforgiving.

Mark hadn’t been scared, still feeling the remnant joy of his afternoon at Wrigley, but his mother had pulled him close to her, shielding him with her body, and had called over the staggering noise to his father, “Weather the storm!”

Mark hadn’t understood that, his ear pressed to his mother’s hip, his hair dark and dripping down in front of his eyes, but his father had nodded and taken his mother’s elbow, leading them down the sidewalk for a half a block before he had looked up, squinting against the rain, and moved his small family into a recessed doorway of intricately carved stone, pulling open a huge wooden door, brushing Mark and his mother inside before he followed.

Mark didn’t know where they were, but he knew they were out of the rain, so he shook himself all over, splattering drops of water on the smooth marble floor, wiping his eyes clear. His mother kept her hand on his shoulder and bent down, whispering into his ear, “We’ll just stay in here until the rain lets up, okay, Mark?”

He had nodded, wondering why she was whispering, and looked around.

It was a church, of course.

There was a wide aisle, the floor slick and shining, flanked by rows of wooden benches, leading up to the altar, above which hovered a vast Gothic rose of stained glass, flashing amazing red and blue and green every time the lightning exploded outside.

Mark had never really spent much time in churches, an aunt’s boring wedding the year before, a Christmas mass with his grandparents, and he took everything in with giant eyes, the still solemnity, the symbols and the desperate scenes of redemption and loss, the sweet quiet air of faith all around him.

His parents led him down the aisle, Mark instinctively keeping his feet Indian-quiet on the floor, and they found a seat in a front pew, staring up at the crucifix that held the most prominent spot in the church.

There were other people in there, weathering the storm, soaked with their clothes plastered to them, and a few kind-looking priests were moving around offering them towels and paper cups of coffee. Everything was spoken in echoing whispers, every sigh bounding off the high stone arches of the roof, every squeak of a shoe on the marble reverberating. Everything was simple and old, like something certain.

Mark, a skinny little kid sitting in a church pew with his parents, his legs swinging freely, kicking up at the hymnals, scabs on his elbows and knees, flyaway dark blonde hair clinging wetly, couldn’t take his eyes off the ten-foot tall crucifix statue, not knowing the name of the man pinned to the cross, growing up as he was in a home that had no specific god but an excess of belief.

The man’s wooden face was twisted in a rictus of agony, his eyes turned beseechingly upwards, blood creeping down his face from the crown of thorns, his mouth open and pleading. Mark could see every muscle in his arms pulled taut, his fingers spread out against the nails, and Mark could count every rib in the man’s emaciated chest, the slash across his side, the painted blood on his legs, the bones in his feet broken.

Mark tugged at his mother’s elbow. “Who is that, Mom?” he asked low, vaguely frightened by the statue as he had not been frightened by the sky breaking open.

His mother blinked. “Well, that’s . . . that’s Jesus Christ.”

“Oh,” Mark replied, his forehead lining in confusion. He had heard the name before, of course, being thanked by ballplayers after a good game, shouted like a curse, mumbled in prayer. He had heard it before, but he still didn’t really have a firm grasp on who it was.

He asked, “How come he’s like that?” nodding to the statue, his face troubled.

His mother took a long moment, clearly trying to work out how best to explain the Rapture to an eight year old. “Well . . . he was murdered. By people who didn’t like what he was saying, I guess. And some . . . some people think he died for . . . us. For our sins.”

“Sins?” Mark asked, wishing she wouldn’t use words that she knew he didn’t understand.

His mother sighed, took his little hand in hers. “The bad things people do, those are their sins. And a lot of people believe that if you have too many sins when you die, you go to hell.”

Mark’s eyes widened, looking around furtively before he whispered with urgency, “Mom, that’s a bad word!”

She smiled, petting his wet hair. “It’s okay this time, Mark.” He eyed her distrustfully, still not understanding. She tugged him closer, tucking him against her, continuing, “So, some people believe that if you sin, if you’re bad, you go to hell. But Jesus, he . . . he didn’t have any sins. Because he was . . . well, he was kind of like God. It’s a . . . it’s a little hard to explain, but some people think that Jesus *was* God. And even though he didn’t have to die, didn’t have to let himself be murdered, he died anyway, because by dying he took away everybody’s sins. He saved us all from hell, but he had to die to do that. And the . . . the people who believe that he died to save us also believe that he was resurrected.”

“Res’rected?” Mark repeated doubtfully.

“He . . . came back to life. He went up to heaven, because that’s where he belonged, that’s his home. And people make statues like that one to remind them of what Jesus went through for them. What he went through so that they could be saved.”

“Oh,” Mark said again. He didn’t really understand, but it seemed like the kind of thing he would understand, someday.

He settled back against his mom, fiddling with her wedding ring, watching the light glint off the diamond. He was quiet for awhile, thinking about the Cubs, and about how he hoped they would stop and get some more ice cream on the way back to the hotel, and about the storm clashing outside, and about how someone should have just helped Jesus down off the cross, they shouldn’t have just let him stay there hurting like that, and then Mark asked, “Do you believe that stuff? About Jesus?” his mouth young and uncertain saying the name.

His mother didn’t answer for a long moment, and Mark looked up at her. She was staring up at the cross, and on her other side, his father was holding her hand, linking their fingers.

His mother looked down at him, and smiled, a kind of sad smile that Mark had never seen on her face before. “I believe that there’s someone looking out for us. Whether or not it’s actually the man up there on the cross, I don’t know. But there’s someone who loves us, and they’re trying to keep us safe. There’s someone who thinks we’re good enough to be saved.”

Mark thought about that for awhile, then said, “Okay,” and asked his dad when they could come back to see the Cubs again.

It was the church he ended up remembering best, small and wet and weathering the storm, his mother telling him the story of the Messiah.

It was the church he ended up remembering best, even though it was years before he fully understood it, and even longer before he finally lost the faith he’d never really had, before he finally decided that whoever is looking out for us has it wrong, because we’re not good enough to be saved, we’re nothing worth loving.

* * *

Zito doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. Mulder is fucked up beyond all measure, right about now.

In Cleveland, Mulder catches the gaze of a man who’s got Zito’s strange crooked grin and flickers his hand through the air when he orders from the bartender, same as Zito does when he’s trying to think of something he’s forgotten.

The man doesn’t look away, and Mulder is all over again surprised by how easy this is, how much more straightforward and direct than picking up a woman, absurd to think that fucking men is so simple when the reason he’s fucking men is the most complicated and difficult thing he’s ever been through.

There’s no backroom in this bar, because this actually isn’t that kind of bar, Mulder just got lucky, so he follows the man out onto the street, and they stand there under the streetlight, Mulder feeling too exposed, anyone could drive by right now and see him standing here with this stranger, though of course they aren’t doing anything, not yet.

The man looks up at him, and Mulder can see his eyes, which were hidden in the shadows of the bar. The man’s eyes are nothing like Zito’s, they are forest fire dark, something destructive.

“You wanna . . . my car,” the man says, jerking his chin down the street.

Mulder nods without a word and the man leads him to his car, parked down at the end of the dead-end street, almost invisible under the thick rustling of the trees and the slanted silhouettes of the buildings.

The man has his keys out, but before he unlocks the door, he extends his empty hand to Mulder and says, “I’m John, by the way.”

Mulder smiles mirthlessly, taking the man’s hand. “Yeah, me too.”

The man pauses, looking up at him suspiciously. “Your name’s John, too?” he asks, thinking he’s being tricked.

Mulder is tired of this, and says shortly, “Does it really fucking matter? Sure, I’m John, what the fuck. Are we going or what?”

His grip on the man’s hand tightens briefly, unconsciously, thinking about bar fights and how good the pavement would feel against his face.

The man stares at him for a moment, then slowly shakes his head, pulling his hand away. “I don’t think so, man,” the man says, his voice edging scared, and Mulder remembers that he’s still pretty intimidating, even feeling weak and useless as he does, he can still frighten people he doesn’t know very well.

The people he does know well, those people he can terrify the living hell out of.

Mulder glares, hating that even this will be taken away from him, and snarls, “Whatever. Picky fucking fag.”

Then he turns and walks away, his head down, and he’s hurting everybody now, he’s hurting strangers and friends and those he loves and the one he doesn’t want to love, he’s hurting everybody in the world, and yeah, yeah, himself most of all.

* * *

He’s gonna get through it. He’s gonna get over it.

He is.

Mulder thinks, ‘hey,’ and he thinks he’s come upon the answer, he’s finally figured out how to get past all this anger and misery and fear, but then his mind stutters to a stop, and he thinks, ‘hey, hey, hey,’ and that’s all.

It’s the last thing he ever wanted to be. This, this right here, this is fucking why he and Sam made all those promises to each other, all those blood-brother vows to never need anyone, to always be able to make it on their own. This, how he feels right now, this is what he’s been running away from his whole life, this is a strain of desire and desperation so pure and elemental it knocks the wind out of him, this is something he swore would never happen to him.

He was right, you know. Everything he ever thought, everything he ever feared would happen if he allowed himself to fall this far, feel this deeply, all of it has come true.

He doesn’t know when he let his guard down, when Zito was able to slip in like a thief, stealing away all the parts of himself that he’d kept so jealously concealed, he doesn’t know when it was that Zito managed to climb inside, he can’t pinpoint the moment when he stopped being just Mark Mulder and became overrun.

It happened, is the point. Everything he didn’t want to happen to him, it’s happened, and he’s not lucky like Sam, he hasn’t gotten anything in return for opening himself up to this kind of attack, he’s gotten nothing that is worth this kind of idiotic hopeless pain.

He was smarter when he was seventeen years old that he is now. Now that this has happened, what can possibly be next?

But, no, he’ll get over it. He’ll have to. He can’t keep up like this, there’s no way.

There’s no fucking way.

* * *

Down in the visitor’s training room at Yankee Stadium, Mulder is getting his arm iced after he leaves the game, a strong performance, eight and a third, six hits, scattered, nine strikeouts, only one earned run.

The pack of ice around his shoulder is huge, bulky, knocking him in the chin or the ear every time he tries to move, held secure by the tightening wrap of bandages, the slow sharp sting of cold fading as his nerves numb, and he squeezes his hand open and shut as he loses feeling, watching his fingers flex like watching a puppet, nothing attached to him.

“All right?” the trainer asks.

Mulder nods. “Yeah, thanks.”

The trainer pats him on his unencumbered shoulder. “Good game.”

The trainer leaves, and Mulder sits back, trying to figure out why he kept hanging up his slider, and why the Yankees didn’t make him pay more for the mistakes.

There’s an echoing clatter of footsteps in the hallway, and he looks up to see Hudson coming into the room.

“Hey, man,” Hudson greets him, going over to dig around in the supply locker.

“Hey,” Mulder replies. “What are you after?”

Hudson is half-disappeared into the locker, and his voice comes out muffled. “Tape for Hernandez. Bradford’s bitching about the shadows again.”

Mulder laughs. “Well, it wouldn’t be a game if Bradford didn’t bitch about the shadows.”

Hudson pulls his head out of the locker, grinning at him. “Hey, you knocked ‘em out today. Why can’t you do that shit more often?”

Mulder rolls his eyes. “Just trying not to make you look too bad, Huddy.”

“Aw, thanks. Between you and the kid, I got my work cut out for me in that department.”

Hudson and Mulder have been calling Zito the kid ever since the three of them started pitching together. Mainly because it bugs the other man. Zito’s always protesting, “Mulder’s not even a year older!” to which Mulder replies with a studied grin, “But in mental ages, you’re still a pre-schooler, and I’m definitely like a congressman or something.”

Right about now, Mulder feels twice as old as everybody on the team, older than he ever thought he’d be.

Hudson re-emerges, a roll of white tape hooked around his fingers. He comes over to the table where Mulder’s sitting, twirling the roll like a pinwheel. He looks down at the other man, his face already dark with a five o’clock shadow, though it’s not even three in the afternoon. Hudson always has a little trouble keeping himself up when they’re on the road, away from his wife, who he needs to remind him to shave and eat properly and not antagonize the Easterners, who are a foreign species to his deep South mind.

“Chavez and them are talking about going to this bar in Jersey tonight,” Hudson says.

Mulder lifts his eyebrows. “Jersey? Coulda sworn there was a pretty cool city right on this side of the river.”

Hudson shrugs. “Yeah, I don’t know. They wanna get drunk in a different zip code for once, I guess. You gonna come along?”

Mulder hedges, because he doesn’t really want to go out and be sociable tonight, not considering that Zito will probably be there, Zito with the new uncertainty that never leaves his eyes anymore, not since Mulder walked out of Zito’s apartment like Zito wasn’t anything that mattered.

“Yeah, I, um, yeah. Don’t know. Tired. Kinda tired. Could sleep or something, probably wouldn’t kill me.”

Hudson hikes an eyebrow. “Probably wouldn’t, no.” He pauses, then says, “But, yeah, come anyway. Most of us are going. Been awhile since we’ve all been out, yeah?”

Mulder smiles. “Man, Timothy, I love it when you start playing cruise director around here.”

Narrowing his eyes, Hudson shoots back, “You sound like no one quite so much as my grandmother when you call me Timothy, you know that?”

“I know.”

Mulder drums his fingers on the table, his shoulder itching under the bandages that hold the ice in place, an itch that he gets each and every single time his arm is wrapped up.

Hudson spins the tape roll, the circle flashing around his hand. “So, that’s a no from you on going to Jersey?”

Rubbing his forehead, Mulder nods. “Yeah, no. Thanks, but. I don’t think so.”

He’s trying not to think that with the whole team in Jersey, it will be easy to find a bar on his own, it will be easy to find someone he won’t tell his real name to.

Hudson shrugs. “All right. Antisocial punk. Be all antisocial in your punk-like ways.”

Hudson surely knows that Mulder is not okay, because Hudson is neither blind nor stupid, but they don’t talk about this kind of shit in Alabama, and for that Mulder is thankful. Probably if he has to hear one more friend of his express concern about the jagged fear in his eyes and the tremble in his hands, probably that will be too much.

At the door, Hudson suddenly turns, having forgotten something. “Oh, hey, keep the kid company tonight, if you’re not coming out with us. He’s been walking around like somebody killed his puppy for a week now.”

Mulder becomes very still. “What do you mean?” he asks slowly.

Hudson flicks his hand through the air. “He’s been out of it. I’d say sad, but I don’t think he’s really got his head on straight enough to be sad. More like confused, maybe. I don’t know. You know how he gets sometimes, like he can’t figure anything out, like he’s lost. Probably it’s nothing. But he didn’t want to come out with us, either, though Chavez has been fixing to drag him along if he has to. Just keep an eye on him, okay? Get him drunk, find him a girl, whatever.”

Oh, that might just be the worst advice ever.

Hudson continues, not registering Mulder’s brief wince. “Anyway, y’all can be antisocial together. Join your forces of antisocialness and, like, take over Metropolis.”

Hudson grins, and is about to head out, when Mulder catches him, his voice weak and staggered for a moment before he clears his throat and pushes strength into his words, “Tim, hey, Tim. Jersey?”

Hudson turns back, looking at him questioningly. Mulder closes his hand around the leg of the table, hidden, so that Hudson won’t see him shaking, and Mulder says, “Yeah, Jersey. That . . . it sounds like fun. Think I’ll . . . think I’ll go after all.”

Because just him and Zito alone in the hotel, that can in no way end good.

Hudson blinks, looking at him in confusion for a moment, then says, “Well . . . okay. Cool. I guess . . . guess the kid can look after himself tonight.”

“Yeah,” Mulder manages, wishing Hudson would stop talking about Zito.

Hudson gives him another incomprehensible look, then says, “All right, see you later. Good game.”

Then Hudson is gone, and Mulder is thinking that if he’s going to be alone, he’s at least not going to be alone with Zito.

* * *

First time Mulder ever saw Zito pitch, it wasn’t in the minors, it wasn’t at the first spring training they were at together. First time Mulder saw Zito pitch, they were both still nobodies, their names not known to each other or any baseball fans, only known by a couple of scouts who were focused on the distant future, only the beginnings of rumblings about the big left-hander from Michigan State, the kid who threw a killer curve but had no velocity.

First time Mulder saw Zito pitch, neither of them had any idea of what was going to happen to them.

Of course, it’s not like anything has changed since then.

He’d gone down to the University of Southern California to visit a friend of his who’d transferred from Michigan State after sophomore year. Mulder had never been to California, and he was quietly awestruck by the scope of the ocean, the epic blue of the Mexican water, the flush of green, the soft warmth, the way everyone looked beautiful and out of his league.

He didn’t fall in love with California, because he wasn’t the kind of guy who fell in love with regions, he wasn’t even the kind of guy who fell in love with people, so fuck the beach, fuck the ocean, the hills, fuck the beauty, it wasn’t anything that struck him so deep that he would never be able to forget it.

And anyway, it was Los Angeles, it was just a desert with a good water source, and all the sureness and grace was just filtered on the surface, just a reflection.

After two nights of sleeping on the couch in his friend’s apartment, a couch that was in no way designed to fit a man of his size, his knees hanging over the arm, his head rolling off the cushion, his hands dragging on the carpet, after two nights of this, Mulder had said to his friend, “You know, man, if you’ve got a grudge against me, you coulda just brought it up, you didn’t have to go through this elaborate plan to kill me.”

His friend (Jamie, Jamie Sullivan, an army brat who’d never lived anywhere longer than eighteen months, careless, fluent in French and Spanish and Italian, someone who truly didn’t need anyone else, having grown up with only himself to count on) had grinned and said, “Don’t worry, bud, I got something that’ll make it up to you.” He paused for effect, his eyes glinting sharply. “You wanna go to a ballgame?”

Mulder considered briefly that everyone he knew seemed to be under the impression that Mulder would forgive just about anything if a baseball game was offered, and then considered that the reason they were under that impression was because it was true.

He grinned back. “Buncha surfers trying to swing baseball bats? Dude, show the way.”

Jamie had taken him out to Dedeaux Field, the college’s baseball stadium, Mulder a bit disconcerted by the roofless stands, accustomed to overhangs, Jamie laughing, saying, “It’s the fucking desert, dude, you see any rain clouds?”

He didn’t, just the wide sprawl of the sky, so blue it would change the color of your eyes, Mulder thinking for a second that if his eyes turned blue, maybe certain things would be clear to him that aren’t now.

They sat in the stands and watched batting practice, the players neatly handsome in their red and white uniforms, Mulder admitting reluctantly that these hippie Californians might have some skills, after all, nothing of course to compare to him and his teammates back in Michigan, but maybe they weren’t a total lost cause.

“You know any of these guys?” Mulder asked, stealing some of Jamie’s peanuts.

Jamie nodded, his eyes tracking a game of pepper being played in the short outfield. “Yeah, I hang out with the left fielder sometimes. His girlfriend is smoking hot, but he’s a pretty nice guy. And the, uh, the what do you call it, utility man? The guy who plays shortstop and second and third and all that?”

Mulder nodded, smirking at his friend’s lack of knowledge about baseball terminology. “Sure, the utility man.”

Jamie pointed him out, jogging around the perimeter of the field. “His name’s Jeff, he gets us on the list for all the best clubs and stuff.”

“Cool,” Mulder replied, reading his line-up card.

They watched the warm-up for a little while longer, then Jamie added, “Oh, and yeah, the kid pitching today. I see him around sometimes. He hangs with my friend Jess’s friend Carlos.”

Mulder looked out at the bullpen, squinting against the sun. The pitchers were just finishing their warm-up, heading into the dugout. “What’s his name?”

Jamie answered, distracted, shaking his nearly empty bag of peanuts, trying to figure out where they all had gone, “Zito. Barry Zito.”

The name didn’t ring any bells with Mulder, and he kept his eyes on the pitcher as he approached. “Jesus, he looks about sixteen years old.”

Later, years later, Mulder would try to remember how Zito had looked that first day, never sure if his memories were real or just reconstructed from the photos he’d seen of Zito at college. Mulder would try to fix a picture in his mind, a first impression, but all he could ever remember when he thought back to the day he’d first seen Zito was how young the other man had looked, his brown hair flopping in front of his eyes, his face caught in the sunlight.

Jamie waved to some kids he knew in the next section over, and said, “Yeah, he’s a sophomore, I think. He’s pretty good, sometimes scouts come out. Your kind of guy.”

Zito had taken the mound, beginning to throw to his catcher as his teammates took the field. Watching his motion and release, following the path of the ball, Mulder snorted. “He’s throwing about eighty miles an hour, I wouldn’t exactly put us in the same league.”

Jamie laughed. “Yeah, but no one’s in the same league as you, are they, Mark?”

Mulder grinned smugly. “Damn right.”

Mulder studied Zito, his high socks, his hair poking down from under his cap, his chorus-girl leg kick, the way he grinned at the shortstop and teased the first baseman, his voice echoing even and unaccented as only a true Californian’s could, noticing that while maybe his fastball wasn’t breaking ninety, his change was as pretty as the whole day, fluttering in at maybe seventy-five miles an hour, and Mulder couldn’t see any difference between his release points.

He conceded to Jamie, “All right, maybe he’s got some stuff. Not much, but some.”

And then Zito threw a curve.

Mulder was watching Zito’s arm, already trying to figure Zito out, something he would still be doing years later, and when Zito let go of the ball, his hand snapping down, Mulder thought ‘fastball’ because of the whipping speed of his arm, but the ball didn’t streak into the catcher’s glove, instead the ball broke the laws of physics, cutting up on a smooth rise, then suddenly hooking downwards, nose-diving, this perfect sweet arc, this stunning fall, dropping like a trapdoor had opened, taking Mulder’s stomach and Mulder’s heart down with it, the catcher scooping it underhand about two inches above the dust, a four foot difference between the rise and fall, twelve-to-six, like the textbook definition of something impossible and beautiful.

Mulder whispered without being aware that his mouth was even open, “Oh, wow.”

Jamie angled him a sidelong look. “Hey?”

Mulder couldn’t take his eyes off the goofy-looking kid on the mound, somehow astounded that no one around him had taken any notice of the amazing pitch Zito had just thrown.

“Did you . . . did you see that?” Mulder managed.

Jamie looked at the field, then back at Mulder. “See what?”

Mulder raised his hand, half-turning to his friend, his eyes still stuck on the mound. “That curve. That fucking incredible curve! You didn’t see that?”

Jamie shrugged. “He throws that all the time. It’s his, what do you call it, his out pitch. Yeah? That he throws to strike guys out? His out pitch?”

Mulder was nodding, staring at Zito, who was laughing with the shortstop, shoving him, messing around. “Yeah. His out pitch. That’s . . . that’s what it is. Fuck. It was really cool. It was . . . fuck, I wish I could throw something like that.”

Even then, even way the hell back then, having only been aware of Zito’s existence for about ten minutes, even in that first vague beginning of something that he would never fully understand, even then, Mulder was already thinking of what Zito had that he didn’t, what Zito had that Mulder would be chasing for the rest of his life.

Jamie nudged him, saying tauntingly, “Hey, thought you said he wasn’t in the same league as you.”

Mulder leaned back, his elbows up along the metal bench, warmed through with the sun, and answered, defending himself, “One good pitch doesn’t exactly make him Roger Clemens.”

Jamie rolled his eyes. “As opposed to you, who are clearly the second coming of the Rocket.”

And Mulder grinned again, suddenly so happy to be here, in the California sun, under this life-changing sky, watching baseball with the drifting salt smell of the ocean in the air, suddenly feeling at home, here where he would get to watch Zito throw that insane knee-buckler all afternoon, and he said, “Damn right.”

After the game (the Trojans took it to the lazy cheers of the southern California crowd, who weren’t nearly as excited by Zito’s curve as they should have been), Jamie stood up, sucking down the last of his Coke, and said, “Hey, you wanna meet some of the guys? You can talk in jargon and stuff, pretend you’re secret agents or whatever the hell it is you do.”

Mulder squinted up at him. “You’ve got quite the inferiority complex when it comes to ballplayers, huh?”

Jamie scowled. “Only because all the ballplayers I know got superiority complexes.” He offered his hand to the other man, Mulder allowing himself to be pulled up. “Come on, you can tell Zito about how you want to marry his curveball.”

Mulder blushed, tried to imagine it was just the flushed sunlight. “That’s just wrong on so many levels,” he retorted.

He looked down at the field, where the players were still slapping hands and enjoying their victory. Zito had emerged from the clubhouse, standing in the middle of a knot of his teammates, distinct there with his shaggy hair that he kept flipping out of his eyes, a sparking curve of a smile on his face making Mulder feel like he was about two feet away from the man, close enough to memorize him.

Mulder averted his eyes, clearing his throat. “Um, that’s . . . it’s cool. We can head. I wouldn’t want you to get bored or nothing, listening to us go on. And anyway, I don’t know any of them.”

Jamie tilted him a curious look. “Hence me introducing you to them.” He looked over his shoulder, the team breaking up, drifting into the dugout, and then turned back, shrugging. “But whatever. You wanna go get something to eat?”

Mulder nodded, following his friend out of the stadium, trying not to look back, trying not to seek out that one particular face among all the others, trying not to pinpoint why he was so unsettled by the idea of meeting Zito.

Jamie took him to the beach, to the best Mexican place north of Tijuana, and Mulder was forced to agree with the assertion that Mexican food anywhere east of the Rockies sucked hard.

And that night, Mulder slept on the contorting couch again, dreaming about surrealistically flawless curveballs and the ocean.

* * *

When they met officially, a year or two later, Mulder had shaken Zito’s hand and never told him that he’d seen him pitch, been stunned like he hadn’t been since he was a kid, stunned from seeing something new after he thought he’d seen it all, and Mulder never told Zito that he had known Zito’s eyes would look like that, he had dreamt it.

* * *

It was the curve, first of all.

Because Mulder wasn’t the kind of guy who fell in love with beautiful stretches of the world, and Mulder wasn’t the kind of guy who fell in love with people, but he was the kind of guy who fell in love with double play combinations, wickedly slick pickoff moves, outfielders scrambling up the wall to haul in a home run, bare-handed grabs of broken-bat squibbers.

Mulder was the kind of guy who fell in love with baseball, who’d been in love with baseball his whole life, so before there was anything else between them, there was Zito’s unimaginable curve, and the way it made Mulder believe in something he thought he’d given up on a long time ago.

Most of the time, Mulder wishes Zito wasn’t such a good pitcher, so unforced and clean, all that swift talent in his body. Because if Zito wasn’t such a good pitcher, then probably Mulder wouldn’t feel like this about him.

It was the curve that started it all.

* * *

Mulder and Chavez invite a bunch of the guys over to their place to hang out one night, mainly because they’re tired of traveling around the city in groups of eight or ten or twelve, crushing into bars, getting separated on public transportation, Mark Ellis calling one of their cell phones to say that he somehow took the wrong exit off 80, and now he’s stuck on Treasure Island and doesn’t know how to get off.

It’s a pretty good night, the air warm and sweet, and they chuck acorns at each other out on the driveway, swinging broom sticks, some of their no-good teammates finding the stash of cookies that Chavez’s mom had sent, devouring the whole bag before either Mulder or Chavez can get there to stop them.

As the party winds down, Mulder and Chavez are moving around the kitchen, peering skeptically into the barren pizza boxes and throwing away the empties.

“Who’s still around?” Mulder asks, sniffing experimentally at a half-full glass of something.

Chavez’s answer is interrupted by a yawn, his words drawn out. “Um, I think . . . Ramon and Byrnes are playing videogames, but they’ll probably leave soon. Scotty’s about to pass out, but he said we can’t let him crash here, he’s got to get home. And . . . Zito’s someplace.”

Mulder keeps his voice casual. “Is he staying?”

Chavez shrugs, tosses an empty can across the room, nothing but trashcan. “Maybe. Probably we should make sure he hasn’t wandered off.”

Zito has a habit of going for walks while drunk, getting himself lost, and it won’t be the first time if he’s tramped off into the hills around Mulder and Chavez’s house, it won’t be the first time if Zito has to be found.

Mulder says, “I think I’ll leave that for you. I’ma go call Scott a cab.”

Mulder sends off Hernandez and Byrnes, and waits with Hatteberg on the front step until the cab pulls up, the first baseman slinging a companionable arm around his neck and telling him conspiratorially, “You know, Mulder, everyone thinks you’re cool, you know that? They think, they think, that Mulder, he’s a cool guy, very cool,” Mulder nodding along seriously.

He goes back into the house, finding Chavez in the bathroom, brushing his teeth. “Night, dude,” Mulder says, his head aching slightly.

Chavez spits and says, “Night. Oh, Zito’s on the patio. But he should be okay.”

Mulder blinks. “How come he’s on the patio?”

Chavez shrugs, rinses out his mouth. “Suddenly we’re looking for logic in what Zito does? That’s just where he fell down.”

Mulder says, “Okay,” and goes into his room, taking two aspirin and deciding not to care about Zito out there on the patio.

Two hours later, still awake, his headache rising sharp and black behind his eyes, Mulder sighs and throws back the covers, padding through the house in his boxers and T-shirt, past Chavez snoring in his room, past the quiet wreckage of the party, out to the back door.

If anyone should ask, Mulder would say that he’s just making sure Zito’s all right out there, that the temperature hasn’t dropped, that no mountain lions have come down out of the hills and decided on the All-Star pitcher blue plate special, that Zito knows he can come inside and sleep on the couch if he wants, he doesn’t have to sleep all alone out there under the stars.

Out on the back patio, though, Mulder sees Zito sprawled across one of the plastic chairs, the back reclined almost flat, one leg kicked out on the concrete, the other dangling off the end, his head rolled to the side, breathing free and even, and Mulder knows that Zito belongs out here, under the stars, as much as he belongs anywhere else.

Mulder sits down carefully on the chair beside Zito, and sighs, watching the hypnotic swim of the pool so that he won’t watch Zito sleeping.

A rusty murmur brings his attention back, and Mulder sees Zito twisting slightly in his sleep, a vaguely distressed look on his face, thin lines pulling across his forehead, his lips pressed tight.

Mulder reaches out without thinking and pushes the hair off Zito’s forehead, smoothing it back, testing the texture and pull of it between his fingers, and Zito’s eyes come open, clear and innocent, like something out of a memory.

Mulder freezes, his hand still in Zito’s hair, staring down at the other man. Zito looks back up at him trustingly, because Zito has always trusted Mulder.

Swallowing, drawing back, Mulder ducks his eyes down, not wanting to see that look on Zito’s face.

They are quiet for a long moment, and then Zito says, not sitting up, “I guess you’re really there, huh?”

Mulder skates his eyes up to Zito’s face for a moment. “You thought I was maybe a hallucination?” he tries to joke.

Zito shakes his head, squeaking the soft plastic. “Maybe a dream.”

Mulder twists his hands together, tapping his thumb against his palm. “No. It’s just me.”

“Just like always,” Zito says, his voice steady, and sits up, carefully, not trusting the shift of the patio chair beneath him. He doesn’t say anything for awhile, looking up at the sky, the far-away light of the stars. Mulder keeps his eyes on Zito’s face, and tells himself that he won’t feel like this forever.

Zito says, his face still tilted upwards, the calm wind riffing through his hair, “I don’t know why you think you can’t tell me things.”

Mulder shakes his head, defensiveness springing through him. “What things?”

Zito sighs, low and sad. “Anything. Why you’re the way you are right now. I mean . . . anything, man.”

Some part of Mulder wants to take the chance, wants to throw himself over this cliff, wants to let Zito break his fall. But Zito still doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Zito still doesn’t know what he’s offering.

“I’m not any way. I don’t know what things you want me to tell you.”

Zito looks at him then, his eyes reflecting the shimmering blue of the water, though Zito’s eyes are not blue. “How come you left that morning?” he asks, softly curious.

Mulder knows he can’t plead ignorance, because Zito has never been one of the people who think Mulder isn’t that bright.

“It’s just . . . it was weird, wasn’t it? I mean . . . didn’t you think it was weird?”

Zito thinks about that for a moment, then shakes his head. “It was . . . it didn’t have to be weird. It could have just been . . . normal.”

How? How could this ever be normal? In what world? No matter what is possible between them, the last thing it would ever be is normal.

Mulder rubs the back of his neck. His headache is still going strong, a tight slow pressure in his temples. “Look, Zito, it’s . . . it’s not anything you should . . . it’s nothing, okay.”

He isn’t looking up, Zito’s response coming to him blind, almost light-hearted, “Shouldn’t lie to your best friend, dude.”

Mulder lets a smile tug at the corner of his mouth, and raises his eyes. Zito is watching him with such easy affection, and Mulder doesn’t have any idea how a guy like Zito ever came to the conclusion that Mulder was worth his time, worth his affection.

There is something hard stuck in Mulder’s throat, something caught up in his chest.

He tries to still his mind, tries not to let his eyes drift down to Zito’s typewriter fingers drumming unevenly on the chair, tries not to see the sleep crease on Zito’s face, tries not to imagine smoothing the line away. He doesn’t have much success.

“I guess . . . there might be some stuff going on right now. Like, in my head. I guess I’m a little crazy right now,” Mulder says, faltering, stumbling.

Zito’s clever hand is reaching out, inching towards Mulder’s knee, and Mulder doesn’t pull away, because he can’t, how could he?

Zito’s fingers touch the hard bone of his kneecap, poking curiously, feeling the slight shift, tapping, exploring, Zito’s fingers restless and searching, running over the curved ridge, testing the give of tendons, Mulder feeling like this small little section of his body is being expertly mapped, wondering helplessly if Zito would spend this kind of time exploring all the rest of him.

Zito is watching his hand with intense concentration, his face serious, and he says, “So . . . that might be what I’m here for. If you’re not doing okay, I guess I’m gonna fix it for you.”

Something in Mulder’s chest stutters to a stop, his breath gone. He is shaking his head, no no no, and he is saying, “Hey, no. You don’t have to. That’s not . . . it’s not your job to make me better.”

Zito looks up, tipping him a smile. “Can it be my hobby, then?”

Mulder wraps his hand around Zito’s wrist, Zito’s fingers going still on his knee, Mulder’s fingertips counting out Zito’s pulse, one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand, like counting the space between the lightning and the thunder, counting to see how far away the storm is.

“Listen, you stupid kid, I’m not gonna drag you down with me,” Mulder says, trying to make his voice strong, trying to get Zito far far away from him so that Mulder can’t do any more damage than he has already.

Zito’s eyes spark hard like flint, and his hand twists sharply in Mulder’s grasp, and now Mulder is the one being held, Zito’s grip firm around his wrist, and Zito says with more certainty than Mulder has ever heard before, “Drag me down with you.”

Mulder can only stare, a hopeless broken sound falling from him, and he watches as Zito’s eyes flash wildly for an instant, like Zito is seeing all the different ways his life could change in that moment, Mulder watches the exhilaration, the fearlessness, the scrawl of something unwieldy and reckless, the staggered possibility of joy, and Mulder watches as Zito’s gaze drops to his mouth, and Mulder is holding his breath, Mulder doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to move again, not until Zito lets him go, or pulls him closer, or . . . something. Anything.

There is something vast about to crash down around them, and the end of the world is close enough to touch, and Mulder knows, in that stunned moment, that anything is possible, everything.

Then Zito blinks, some sense of rationality returning to him, sneaking onto his face, and he lets go of Mulder’s wrist, staring down at his own hand like he can’t believe what it’s done. He looks up at Mulder, surprised, hey-dude-what-the-hell-was-that, and then he says, his voice unsteady, “And don’t call me kid. For the last time.”

Of course it won’t be the last time, not as long as Zito keeps having two different conversations at once, not as long as Zito keeps trusting Mulder, not as long as Zito keeps refusing to understand what Mulder’s trying to tell him. What Mulder’s trying with all his power to keep from telling him.

Mulder stands, his legs shaking, and he says, “Come inside. You can . . . you can sleep inside.”

Zito stands too, rising into shadows, and there is something shrewd and not-at-all young glinting in his eyes as he asks, “Where inside?”

Mulder goes motionless, staring at Zito, trying to read that unfamiliar expression on Zito’s face, trying to figure out what Zito means by a question like that. Mulder’s mind is chanting, ‘my room, my room, sleep in my room, please, my room, that’s where, my room, my room, my room,’ but he answers, his voice scraping, “The . . . the couch. Yeah? The couch.”

“Oh,” Zito says, his face falling a bit, something Mulder wishes he didn’t have to see.

Mulder swallows and turns his eyes resolutely away, leading Zito back into the dark house, bringing him a pillow and blanket, settling him in, then standing awkwardly over the couch as Zito looks up at him.

“So . . . you’re good? Got everything you need?” he asks lamely.

Zito has the pillow crushed in his arms, hugging it. Mulder can’t see his eyes, just this dim awareness of Zito’s gaze tracking over his face. “If . . . if I need something else, I . . . know where you are. Right?” Zito answers hesitantly, half-whispering.

Mulder looks away, out the window, because he is not what Zito needs.

“Yeah,” he whispers.

He tries to shoot Zito a grin as he turns to go, but he has a feeling Zito can see right through him, and Mulder heads down the hallway to his room, trying to shake the feeling that he’s running away.

Mulder will not sleep. He will listen for the soft pad of feet in the hallway, he will listen for the creak of his door as it is pushed open, he will imagine Zito slipping into his room, he will imagine the shy grin on Zito’s face just before Mulder pulls him down onto the bed, he will watch the light creep across the wall, dawn coming slow and lonely, and he will not sleep.

He doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to sleep again.

* * *

The thing about Zito, this stupid kid, this halfway hippie with his punk-dyed hair and his old-school Reeboks with the red stripes, this space-cadet with his head in the clouds, this surfer who plays the guitar and still talks to his parents once a week at least, this boy-wonder pitcher with more talent in his left arm than the rest of the league has combined, this soft-grinning, sure-handed, stuffed-animal-collecting, practical-joke-playing, sweet-eyed best friend of his, the thing about Zito is that he’s not someone Mulder can talk himself out of.

The thing about Zito is that he’s unexpected, unpredictable, he’s the reoccurring kind, he’s a disaster waiting to happen, he’s everybody’s favorite.

The thing about Zito is that he’s Mulder’s ride home, Zito’s always on the way to wherever Mulder’s going.

The thing about Zito is that he walks around in a perpetual state of second-day stoned, something a friend of Mulder’s had explained to him once, the haze after a night of smoking pot that lingers the next day, able to think clearly but still just slightly off, ticked up onto a vaguely higher plane, drifting sleepy and careless and good-willed, and though Zito doesn’t smoke pot (anymore), the second-day stoned has stuck with him, maybe it’s something Zito has always had.

The thing about Zito is that Mulder didn’t see him coming.

The thing about Zito is that he’s lucky, he’s blessed, he’s been chosen from on high, he’s beloved of some divine force, maybe not God, but at least something wearing His clothes.

The thing about Zito is that he forgets to put his wallet in his pocket some mornings, caught out on the sidewalk without cab fare, and he’s always running late to dinner and movies, getting distracted by record stores or used bookstores, wandering happily through, surrounded by the smell of old paper and new plastic, he goes off into the world unprepared, trusting that the world will take care of him, and the world always does.

The thing about Zito is that he makes everything better. Everything.

The thing about Zito is that he makes Mulder forget everything he’s ever learned, makes him forget to be cautious or doubtful or stubbornly closed off, makes him forget that he doesn’t want to feel like this.

The thing about Zito is that he laughs at the parts of movies that no one else does, he gets all the jokes that go right over everybody else’s heads, and he’s absolutely convinced that John Fogerty is singing ‘Willie goes into a dance, the devil’s on kazoo,’ rather than ‘Willie goes into a dance and doubles on kazoo,’ because the first is better.

The thing about Zito is that he’s a good alibi, he’s always got your back, he has an instinctive knowledge of the Pacific Ocean and a shortcut to Mexico if he needs to make a quick escape.

The thing about Zito is that he’s got baseball scrawled across his heart, encoded on his DNA, sketched in his fingerprints, balletic double plays leaping through his eyes, the swift rush of a perfect swing tracing the lines on his palms, mapping out his past, his future, his love, his life.

The thing about Zito is that if ever there was a time when Mulder could get rid of him, that time is long past.

The thing about Zito is that he’s going to break Mulder’s heart, but that’s only fair, because Mulder didn’t really have a heart before Zito came along, anyway.

* * *

When Mulder was sixteen years old, his newly-minted driver’s license burning a hole in his pocket, he went driving one day, not looking to go anywhere in particular, still taken by the novelty of being able to legally get behind the wheel of a car and head off in whatever direction he wanted.

It was raining hard, cold autumn rain, not feeling much like World Series weather at all, though Game 3 was on later that night, Mulder rooting for the Phillies just because he wasn’t about to root for Canadians.

Driving in the rain wasn’t something he’d done a lot, his slight, unacknowledged anxiety spurring a bit whenever the sweep of the windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with the deluge, the swirling gray water making everything melted and indistinct.

Mulder loved driving, already planning road trips with his friends, talking about New York City, California, Mexico, the whole country suddenly available to them, their horizons busted open, dreaming about the mountains and the oceans and the rivers he’d never seen, thinking abstractly that somewhere out at the end of the highway he would find whatever it was he was looking for.

Somewhere west of town, out in the battered fields, the crops just recently plucked clean by the harvest, lying flat and dull yellow-gray, somewhere out on the slick black road, Mulder drove out of the rain.

It happened so fast, he barely even realized it, the wipers brushing away one last flood of water, then the windshield all of a sudden clear, not pounded by rain, the wipers squeaking on the glass as they flipped back over.

Mulder took a moment to make sure that this wasn’t just some strange anomaly, some good-weather pocket in the midst of the storm, but when the road stayed clear and dry before him, he pulled over, confused.

Rolling down his window, he stuck his head out, looking up at the sky. The clouds still hung thick and pale, heavy, but way off he could see the break in the cover, the stretch of blue, the reaching light of the sun, peeking out over the low-slung clouds.

Mulder pulled his head back in and started the car again, turning around, heading back towards town, but slower now, closing in on darker skies, the rough struggle swarming above his home.

Driving slow, Mulder saw the line where the rain stopped before he crossed it, but he didn’t quite believe it.

The line was clearly defined, one half noticeably brighter and dryer than the other, which was soaked and glumly shadowed. Cutting the highway in half, the line scrolled out as far as Mulder could see, stringing out on a perfect north-south parallel, slicing across Illinois.

Mulder pulled up just before he crossed this bizarre demarcation, stepping out of his car hesitantly, still not fully certain of what it was he’d found.

No rain fell on him, the dim guttering sunlight spanning his shoulders, and Mulder walked up to the line, reaching his hand out, feeling the patter of rain dousing his hand and his wrist, but no more than that, his forearm and elbow staying bone dry.

Mulder had never seen anything like this before, he had never known that rain could stop with this kind of geometry, he had never known that the difference between good weather and bad could be a straight line, he had never known that the world could be divided this easily.

Mulder walked into the rain, immediately soaked with it, blurring his eyes, his clothes sticking to him, and then he ducked back out of it, laughing.

Sixteen years old, and already at his full height, but not yet grown into it, still too skinny, his arms and legs gangly and awkward, his hands too big, clumsy, not at home in his body, which had sprouted up on him without warning over the past three years, feeling halfway betrayed and not really in control, knocking things over, stumbling through crowds, splitting the seams of his favorite shirt, sixteen years old, too tall to be a boy anymore, not fitting in anywhere, sixteen years old, but right then, at the place where the rain stopped, Mulder was as young as he’d ever been, wide-eyed and amazed.

He hopped in and out of the rain for awhile, standing and letting himself be bisected, playing games with the rain, swiping his hand, lifting his face, opening his mouth to let the water fall on his tongue, and for awhile, the world made a kind of perfect sense to him, the world had a sense of humor that Mulder could get totally behind, the world was easy to understand, as easy as to say, here it’s raining, and here it’s not.

For awhile, dancing in and out of the rain, Mulder was at home in the world, he was where he belonged.

* * *

All right, so he’s not stupid. At least not that stupid.

Mulder knows Zito wants something from him, something more than regular best friend shit, more than just helping Mulder through this.

He can see it in Zito’s face sometimes, brief hidden expressions dragging across his features, Zito’s eyes darting, sometimes he can almost hear the questions Zito doesn’t ask.

‘So that time when we fell asleep on my couch, what was that?

‘So that time when you almost maybe should have kissed me on the patio, why didn’t you?’

‘So, hey, Mulder, hey, drag me down with you, why aren’t you dragging me down with you?’

But Zito never asks those questions, and Mulder is never entirely positive he isn’t just warping this into what he wants it to be, he’s never entirely sure that all this isn’t just him being fucked up and projecting onto Zito.

Fucking Introduction to Psychology, still with him a half a dozen years after he slept through most of the lectures.

Mulder doesn’t know anything for sure anymore, but he’s fairly certain that he doesn’t want to do this to Zito, because Zito doesn’t deserve this, and he doesn’t deserve Zito.

He’s pretty sure he’s right about that, at least.

* * *

Mulder and Chavez, driving back from the stadium, body-sore and head-excited from the win, get stuck in traffic on a street that is usually open and near-deserted.

Chavez rolls down his window and pokes his head out, peering down the road. “Hmm,” he says speculatively.

Mulder, behind the wheel and already annoyed by the delay, says, “Well, what? The fuck is going on up there?”

Chavez falls back into the seat, pulling up his knees, his sneakers on the dash. “Wreck, looks like.”

Mulder leans over, knocking his feet off the dashboard. “Keep your dirty shoes on the floor.”

Chavez toes off his shoes and pops his socked feet back up on the dashboard. Mulder scowls but doesn’t argue it, because Chavez has found a loophole.

They inch forward, Mulder getting more and more impatient, smacking Chavez’s hand away from the radio, drumming his fingers on the wheel, sighing with irritation.

After a half a mile of this, Chavez slants him a look. “You wanna knock off the ADD for awhile, dude? You’re making me nervous.”

“I want to get fucking home, already,” Mulder mutters.

Chavez shrugs. “Me too. Shoulda taken my shortcut.”

Mulder rolls his eyes. “Dude, your shortcut involves driving the wrong way down a one-way street, and breaking about fifteen other laws besides.”

“Yeah, but we’d be home by now, wouldn’t we?” Chavez grins.

“Or in jail.”

“Whatever.”

Mulder can see a little spiral of black smoke down the road a bit, and the beating whip of an ambulance or cop car’s lights, wicking red and blue.

“Think we’re coming up on it, now,” he says, sitting up straighter, wrapping his hands around the wheel.

They pass guttering highway flares, laid out like firecrackers on the side of the road, spewing out pink sulfurous smoke the color of a match head, a cop in a reflective orange coat guiding the cars into one lane, merging them together.

Mulder doesn’t want to be a rubbernecker, but he’s got no special powers that make him different from everybody else that slows and turns to look at the wreckage.

Chavez has got his hands up on the window, smudging cloudy fingerprints, unselfconsciously gawking at the car crash, and Mulder leans forward to see past his dark head.

There are two cars, boxed in by ambulances and black-and-whites, shotgun-ready, the ambulances’ back doors swung open, stretchers rolled out. One of the cars, a small rust-red Volvo, has had its front end bashed in, the metal screeching back, folded like paper, the windshield shattered, a bright spiderweb burst of glass. The other car, a faded green pick-up, is like the missing piece of the puzzle, the driver’s side crushed, obviously where the Volvo slammed into it, the door snapped back but still hanging on to its hinges, the exploded airbag slopping out over the seat, dusting the cab with gray powder.

There’s nobody in or around the Volvo, but there’s a yellow tarp on the pavement by the pick-up’s front wheel, a clearly identifiable shape beneath it.

“Oh, Jesus,” Chavez whispers, realizing what he’s looking at, drawing back, his face twisting.

Mulder can’t take his eyes off the yellow tarp, this terribly fake-looking death shroud, he can’t help imagining who it is beneath that tarp, who it was, a man, a woman, someone who maybe loved baseball, maybe knew all the lyrics to every song the Beatles ever wrote, maybe went in to check on their kids every night, just to make sure, maybe threw away everything to come to California, maybe had a rosary hooked around the rearview mirror to protect them from harm, maybe was saving up for a trip to Japan, maybe collected the first editions of famous books, maybe was a good person, maybe bad, maybe both, maybe uncertain and scared, maybe with the best intentions but a history of wrecking things, maybe nobody he would have noticed on the street, maybe nobody who would have turned his head, maybe just somebody who’d tried their best.

“Drive, Mulder,” Chavez says low, snapping his attention back, Mulder realizing that the road had opened up beyond the crash.

Mulder shakes his head, banishing thoughts of the pencil-yellow tarp and whoever it is that has come to this end.

* * *

Mulder thinks a lot about storms. Natural disasters.

He feels as random and inconstant as the weather, these days, and he wonders if this is something new, maybe it’s the way it’s always been, and it just took him this long to realize it.

He’s not someone you can count on. Not someone you can trust, though a bunch of people trust him anyway. Mulder, he’s never cared about anybody but himself. Never wanted to. He’s spent so long holding himself above all others, arrogant and self-absorbed, this impossible standard, and he always thought, no matter what happened, he’d be strong enough to deal with it, because he’s always been so much stronger than everyone around him.

And somewhere, on the radio maybe, a television he can hear but cannot see, somewhere he hears, “An egocentric with self-destructive tendencies,” and he thinks that that’s a contradiction, that’s a paradox, that makes no sense, but then he finds himself driving too fast in the rain, the road slippery under the whipping slick wheels, begging annihilation, and he knows that you can love yourself and want to kill yourself at the same time, because either the world doesn’t deserve you or you don’t deserve the world, and at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter which is true.

When the summer storms fall on Oakland, the two weeks of rain an easy price to pay for the months of clear blue skies and perfect sunshine, when the summer storms come, Mulder stands out in the weather and thinks about original sin, he thinks that he is at the mercy of the wind, he has no idea where he will end up, and he is lost just like the rain is lost, everything in him chaos.

Because the storm is a destructive force and so is he.

* * *

First off-season Mulder spent in Oakland, he kept waiting for it to snow.

He was renting a cheap studio apartment near the Berkeley city line, a building filled with graduate students and groups of five or six overly-loud interns living in two bedrooms. He hadn’t yet gotten used to the fact that his signing bonus made him fairly well-off, and looking for a nicer place seemed like tempting fate, like within a year he would be scrapping again, maybe bounced back to the minors, maybe having to look for a real job.

He didn’t know anyone in Oakland, and everyone he met seemed to come from somewhere else, complicated accents, the lost Rs of New Englanders, the rounded vowels of Southerners, the smeared-together words of New Yorkers. He wondered if anyone was ever born in California, or if they all just found their way here, like he had.

Mulder wasn’t sure about the Bay Area. It was too bright, too easy. He didn’t trust it. It was the first week of December and though it was tightly, shivering cold, the sky was fantastically blue, a kind of blue that was crushing to the senses, like the color could be breathed in, like it could wrap around a person and protect them.

He ran into Zito on the street in San Francisco, down in Haight-Ashbury, which was dirty and scattered with teenaged runaways and baffled hippies who wandered around aimlessly, looking for what they had lost.

Zito was coming out a record store, stepping onto the sidewalk and immediately digging into the yellow plastic bag, pulling out two CDs, studying them, making sure they were what he’d wanted.

Mulder recognized him in a second, strange after months of not seeing a familiar face, but he was hesitant, because he didn’t really know Zito, they’d only met a couple of times, the most recent when a bunch of the newly-signed A’s had come by to meet their new team, Zito staring with huge eyes at the Oakland clubhouse, shaking everybody’s hand two or three times, not remembering anybody’s name, distracted by the casual way the players moved around, as if this wasn’t the place they’d dreamed of since they were kids, as if this wasn’t everything a person could wish for.

Zito flipped the CD in his hand, and Mulder thought of the swift grace of his hand slashing down, throwing that curve, and Mulder knew he shouldn’t be thinking of that.

Mulder was just sort of standing there, brushed aside by the punks and the people who muttered darkly under their breaths, when Zito looked up and caught sight of him.

“Hey!” Zito said, his face surprised. “You’re . . . hey, I know you, huh?”

Zito came over to him, grinning and confused. “I think we’re teammates. Yeah?”

Mulder smiled. “Think so, yeah. Mark Mulder.” He extended his hand to the other man, weirdly formal, but Zito took it without a second thought, shaking it so smoothly Mulder half-expected him to slide into a faith shake, hooking their thumbs.

“Sure, sure. Michigan State. I remember,” Zito said, his eyes catching the light.

Mulder nodded, and realized he was still holding onto Zito’s hand. He let it fall and stuffed his hands in his pockets, squinting.

“You live here? I mean like, year-round?” Mulder asked, noticing how perfectly Zito fit in with the pure blue sky and the charmed natives.

Zito nodded, then shook his head. “Well, not *here*. Not like, in the record store. But, yeah, over the hill.” He pointed, somewhere off towards the ocean, like this was all the direction anyone needed.

Mulder had gotten used to the entirely unhelpful information of ‘over the hill,’ ‘up the hill,’ ‘bottom of the hill,’ that San Franciscans had a tendency to give out, not seeming to realize that the whole damn city was hills.

“Cool,” he replied, and there was a moment of silence that should have been more awkward than it was. “I live, uh, over . . . there,” trying to orient himself, trying to find east, though he had a feeling he was indicating somewhere in the vicinity of Sausalito. “Oakland. There.”

Zito grinned and reached out, gently taking hold of Mulder’s arm, held out like a signpost, and maneuvering it a few degrees over. “There,” he corrected mildly.

Mulder found himself grinning back, only a little sheepish. “Yeah, meant to do that. Just testing you.”

Zito laughed, and then Mulder said unexpectedly, “You’re the only person I know in California,” Mulder automatically wincing, stupid thing to say.

Zito didn’t seem to notice, though, just said, “Well, it’s a big state, dude, you’re bound to make some friends.” Then he smiled and said, “But for now, you got me. You wanna go see a really big rubber band ball?”

Mulder blinked, unaccustomed to Zito’s schizophrenic conversation style. “Rubber bands? The hell?”

Zito started walking, tugging his arm, Mulder stumbling after him. “Yeah, it’s in this bodega in the Mission District. It’s really cool. Like, regular bodega, right, but then, crazy-big ball of rubber bands!”

Mulder didn’t understand about half of that, mainly what the hell a bodega was, but Zito was showing him the CDs he’d bought (Social Distortion and the Clash, apparently because Zito’s sister had insisted he needed more punk music in his life), and pointing out the T-shirt shop on the corner of Haight and Ashbury that had tie-dyed shirts of Jerry Garcia and Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin covering every inch of wall and ceiling space, and Mulder realized, with a simple kind of amazement, that he’d made friends with this man in the space of about two minutes. Or maybe Zito had made friends with him. It didn’t really matter, he decided.

Mulder couldn’t remember the last time this had happened so quickly, probably not since he was messing around in the sandlot and hollering to strange kids on the street, “Hey, you wanna play pepper?”

Later that night, after the ball of rubber bands had been duly admired (a bodega, he learned, was a corner grocery, or even more specifically, a corner grocery run by an Asian family. The ball was indeed crazy-big), they were wandering around the Mission District, drinking Coke out of glass bottles (tastes better that way), when Zito asked him, “So, are you looking for frogs, or what?”

Mulder, a little more practiced in the art of the non-sequitur after an evening with Zito, took his time trying to figure out what that might mean, and then said, “Sorry, but that made just no sense at all.”

Zito half-grinned. “You keep looking up at the sky. Figured you were waiting for a rain of frogs or something.”

Momentarily distracted by the thought process that would make a rain of freaking frogs the most logical reason why a person would be looking up at the sky, Mulder shrugged. “Just wondering if it’s gonna snow tonight. Looks kinda like it. The clouds.”

The clouds were thick and white, tough hovering over the city, brief stark glimpses of the sky like jagged shards of obsidian. They’d pulled in as night fell, like they had to wait until the blue was gone before they could shroud the sky.

Zito stopped, looking at him for a moment as if expecting a punchline, then started grinning, the kind of grin that was just seconds away from bursting into laughter.

Mulder narrowed his eyes. “What?” he demanded.

Zito shook his head, still with that snickering grin. “Dude, it doesn’t snow here.”

Mulder stared at him, then up at the sky again, the clouds vast, looking for all the world like they were stuffed with a blizzard. “Are you kidding me?”

Letting a laugh escape, Zito shook his head again. “It definitely doesn’t snow here. We’ve just got earthquakes.”

“Oh,” Mulder said, a little disturbed. “Well . . . how do you know it’s winter, then?”

Zito tossed a companionable arm around his shoulders, replying cheerfully, “We look at a calendar. Works like a charm.”

Mulder shifted under the not-unpleasant weight of Zito’s arm. “This is a stupid place,” he declared, feeling robbed.

Zito’s eyes widened, a mock-up of insult on his face, his hand tightening on Mulder’s shoulder. “Hey, now, what kinda thing is that to say? I’ma have to challenge you to a duel, you call my home stupid again.”

“Oh, what, fastballs at dawn? I think I might have you beat on that one, man,” Mulder shot back, a smile unwillingly rising to his face. “But, seriously, no snow, just the possibility that this’ll all be an island tomorrow? The hell kind of city is that?”

Zito beamed. “Best one in the world. Whole world, man. And I’ve been around.”

He slid his arm off Mulder’s shoulders and began to move down the sidewalk again, before he suddenly came to a stop, turning to face the other man.

Mulder, still watching the sky distrustfully, ran right into him, their noses bumping before Mulder stepped back, looking at the other man questioningly.

“Just realized,” Zito said, standing in the warm illumination of a streetlight, well-defined, photographically beautiful. “I forgot to introduce myself. I’m Barry Zito.” He stretched out his hand to Mulder, the shadow of it cutting long on the concrete, reaching Mulder’s shadow, making them look linked.

Mulder looked down at the hand offered him, then up at Zito in disbelief. Did Zito really think Mulder didn’t know who he was? They’d spent the last four hours together, and now Zito realized he’d never given his name?

Mulder laughed, taking Zito’s hand. “Pleased to meet you, man,” he said, grinning, thinking that maybe there was a reason everyone ended up in California, maybe they’d all found something like this.

* * *

Mulder thinks about leaving, sometimes. Running away.

Insane, ridiculous. All he’s ever wanted to do is just play the game, and here he is. His name is never omitted when people talk about the top pitchers in baseball, he’s one of the Big Three that make up one of the best rotations in the league. Everything he’s ever expected of himself, demanded of himself, it’s all right here.

But sometimes he doesn’t think he’ll be able to take it, not for a day longer, not an hour, seeing Zito, all his memories of the city where he lives tinged with memories of Zito, unable to escape him, unable to escape anything.

Where would he go, what would he ever do? Get a job? Leave the game behind, never play again? Impossible. Unimaginable.

He could run away from Zito, run away from California, but what could he be if he’s not a ballplayer?

He asks himself what matters more, baseball or Zito?

And though he knows the answer to that, he can’t bear to think of it.

* * *

They’re out at a bar in Baltimore, and Mulder is playing darts with Hatteberg while Chavez hits on girls (something he does regardless of how far away from home they are) and Zito and Hudson huddle over the jukebox, Zito’s no-argument vetoes of Hudson’s selections of country music rising above the easy murmur of conversation.

“See, Hatty,” Mulder says, lining up his shot. “It’s all in the wrist.” He flicks the dart at the board, twenty points.

Hatteberg scowls. “And I’m sure it’s got nothing to do with the fact that it’s your job to be able to throw with accuracy.”

“Nothing at all to do with that. This is a totally different area in which I am also extremely talented,” Mulder replies, trying to hear what Zito’s saying, down the wall, something about how Johnny Cash isn’t really country, because Johnny Cash is, you know, good.

Chavez comes over, a grin on his face. “Got her number,” he says happily, waving a cigarette around, a line of black writing like hieroglyphics carefully written on the thin paper.

The woman he’s been talking to has got cheekbones as sharp as accusations, skinny wrists, epically dark eyes. She’s sitting at the bar, trying not to look back at Chavez, self-conscious.

Mulder lifts his eyebrows. “She wrote it on a cigarette?”

Chavez nods. “Yeah, neither of us had any paper, and the napkin kept tearing.”

“Maybe she’s just hoping you’ll smoke it accidentally and never call her,” Hatteberg teases.

Chavez tucks the cigarette behind his ear, a narrow white backslash cutting through his black hair, looking tougher than he is, 1950s cool. He grins and takes the darts out of Hatteberg’s hand, effortlessly throwing two, hitting the bulls-eye both times, once the inner circle and once the outer.

“Whoa,” Mulder says in surprise. “Since when can you play darts?”

“Since always, dude,” Zito’s voice suddenly comes from behind him, making Mulder start. Zito has snuck up, spy-quiet, come out of nowhere. He does that a lot. “What, he’s never hustled you for fifty bucks a game?”

“That’s not a hustle, Zito, that’s an honest wager that I just always happen to win,” Chavez says with a cocky grin, still clearly riding high from his victory with the woman who is occasionally slipping him looks and blushing.

Zito doesn’t put his hand on Mulder’s shoulder, but Mulder can almost feel it anyway, the simple comfortable weight. Hatteberg and Chavez head to the bar for another round, and Mulder and Zito are left alone, looking at each other.

“You wanna play?” Zito asks, nodding towards the board.

Johnny Cash comes on over the speakers, singing about darkness. Mulder decides in an instant that he will play darts with Zito, and he will win, no matter what, because he’s already lost too much to Zito as it is.

* * *

Unconnected. Far away.

Mulder is stuck in the past, right now. This is who he is. He doesn’t know anything, he can’t count on future, he doesn’t trust his cruel heart or his baffled mind, he never knows what to do, so he has to look back, he has to search his past for the things that he used to be, so that he doesn’t have to think about all the things he isn’t now.

He’s the kid in the church, the halfway man in Carlton’s dorm room, he’s curled up on himself, holding his sprung ribs on the bloody asphalt, he’s asleep on Jamie’s couch, he’s waiting for it to snow in San Francisco, he’s Sam’s friend, he’s sixteen years old at the place where the rain stopped, he’s watching two kids dance in the middle of the street in Washington D.C., he’s the guy who doesn’t talk much, who knows baseball like Christians know the Scripture, he’s eight years old at Wrigley Field, promising his dad that he’ll play baseball until the day he dies.

He’s all of these things, because he doesn’t want to be the man in the backrooms of bars, he doesn’t want to be the man that everyone can tell isn’t okay, he doesn’t want to be the man who walked out of Zito’s apartment without asking him anything, without telling him anything that might have changed either of their lives. He can’t be Mark Mulder anymore; he can’t admit to himself that Mark Mulder has been torn down to this, that this is what has become of him.

He used to be strong and certain and he used to know for sure that as long as he could play the game, he wouldn’t need anything else.

And this isn’t true anymore, and he is looking to the past because he can’t bear to look at the present, because he’s terrified of the future, and he remembers a time when he wasn’t scared of anything, not anything in the world.

He’s looking to the past because that’s all that’s left him, because he’s ruined everything else.

He’s looking to the past because he’s got no other options.

* * *

Down Interstate 280, the highway that cuts through the hills, tracing the fault line, branching off to Half Moon Bay and Mavericks, one of the best surfing beaches in the world, the western edge of the peninsula, down a few miles shy of the exit to Highway 17 and Santa Cruz, there’s a small community college, a few big boxy buildings, the main parking lot spread out on a cliff, running out to a sheer edge, just a low curb clinging to the asphalt.

Mulder goes out there sometimes, way after midnight, the past-black shadows of the hills. Driving out, just south of Daly City, there’s a rise at the top of which it’s always raining.

Mulder doesn’t remember when it was he discovered the college, the huge auditorium flanked by the parking lot and the playing fields, and he doesn’t remember the first time he was wandering around and realized that the metal ladder coming down from the roof of the auditorium was easily accessible in the middle of the night, the guards either non-caring or non-existent, but he’s been climbing to the top of the auditorium for awhile now, when he can’t sleep, when he just wants to drive somewhere with the windows rolled all the way up and the music loud, the whole car shivering with the prehistoric fall of the bass beats.

He climbs up to the roof of the auditorium, his backpack slung heavy over one shoulder, and up top it’s like the highest point in the world, the soft hills stretching out for miles, pale yellow grass lit up by the moon, Portola Valley and the long way to perfect sweeping green of Pescadero, the satellite dish of the Stanford foothills craning upwards, trying to make contact with something out in space, something undefined, the ocean glinting so far off, bigger than anything he’s ever imagined, the spun-glass stars sparkling on the waves until it looks like the sky has fallen into the water and he can’t tell one from the other.

He stays up there for a long time, some nights, the wind rushing with fierce power around him, the baffling silence, the creeping roads illuminated with orange lights, looking like rivers as they curve sweetly over the landscape.

He stays up there and he drinks bottles of beer, clinking in his backpack. Every empty bottle, he wings out into the darkness, cartwheeling over the vast parking lot, twinkling and catching the light. He’s pretty sure his arm is good enough that he can clear the whole span of the asphalt, that the flying bottle will vanish soundlessly over the edge into the brush, but every time, every single time, there is the deep breathless moment of flight and then the far-away sound of breaking glass, and he knows that he hasn’t made it.

* * *  
Mulder’s not scared, because Mulder doesn’t get scared, but if he did, he would be.

He’s always known his way, where to go, how to get there, the shortcuts, the roads where he can go double the speed limit and the intersections he can fly through without stopping, he figured out a long time ago that the world is full of secret passages if you just know where to look for them.

And now, okay, now he doesn’t recognize anything, now he gets lost two blocks from his house, now nothing makes sense.

He’s got a black-and-white mind, because he has spent his life believing in solid things, clearly definable, box scores and statistics and the codes of the game, the acronyms and numbers spelling out grass and sunlight to him, and he doesn’t understand gray areas, he doesn’t understand that there are some things that can’t be understood.

The game should have been enough, it always has been enough, but not anymore.

And he thinks, ‘hey, no, please, no,’ but he doesn’t know what he’s trying to stop from happening.

And he tells himself he’s not going to feel like this forever, over and over, he tells himself this, he’s not always going to feel this lost, this hopeless, this confused, this abandoned.

He tells himself it’s not going to last forever.

And he’s right.

* * *

Back in Oakland, the summer is dying slowly.

Out at another bar, somewhere between Richmond and Berkeley, another place that’s hard to pinpoint on a map, out at another bar, Mulder is splintering, and not really caring about anything anymore.

His hands are shaking, but, okay, his hands always shake, these days, except when he can wrap them around a baseball, feel the scuffed red stitches under his fingertips, counting the one hundred and eight, which is the same number as beads in a rosary, which makes it a holy thing, maybe.

And Mulder doesn’t look at Zito anymore, because when he does, he can’t breathe, and Zito is always looking at him with an expression that reminds Mulder of some far-distant highway in the corner of his memory, stretching out endless over the desert, the road you’d take if you wanted to get lost, if you never wanted to come back again.

Zito is always looking at him like he has faith that Mulder will figure out this thing between them, Mulder will be able to make sense of it, and Mulder can’t stand that look in his eyes.

Mulder is chasing whiskey with vodka with tequila, but he doesn’t get drunk, hatefully clear, not missing anything that happens.

Chavez laughing like a machine gun, short sharp bursts as he loses his breath. Hudson calling his wife, one hand pressed over his ear to block out the noise, hollering into the cell phone, hollering, “I love you, babe, okay? I love you, I never wanna love anybody but you,” his face flushed and happy, not usually an emotional or overly affectionate drunk, but sweetly sincere when the urge does overtake him. Tejada splicing Spanish into his conversation without being aware of it, things like, “Okay, tomorrow, vamos a la playa, I think. You want to come conmigo?” Ellis kicking the Pac-Man arcade game, yelling at it for stealing his quarter. A smear of unfamiliar faces, strangers asking for his autograph, shaking his hand, pointing to the group of them from across the room, making Mulder feel like everyone is watching them, everyone can see everything.

He doesn’t look at Zito, because Zito is waiting for something from him, and Mulder knows he has nothing to give the other man, nothing that Zito will ever need, nothing that Mulder could ever live without.

Across the bar, Mulder catches the gaze of a dark-haired man, the slight bend of a formerly broken nose adding a kind of battered grace to his features, looking too young everywhere except his eyes, which are fierce and wise and desperate, and desperation is something Mulder feels right at home with.

When their eyes meet, the dark-haired man darts a quick shy grin, and for an instant he could be Zito’s brother, and Mulder is thinking, motherfucker.

Mulder looks away, because he can’t do that here, not now, not with his friends all around him, not in this bar where he has been recognized all night long, where the television in the corner is playing SportsCenter and the west coast scores and highlights are coming up just after the commercial break.

Mulder looks away, and tries not to hear the slow numbing whisper in his mind: why the fuck not, why the fuck not, why the fuck not.

He wraps his hand around the shot glass in front of him, his long fingers overlapping his thumb, and he feels the give of the glass, wonders how much pressure it would take to shatter it, spear shards into his palm.

Hudson, having finished his phone call, is talking about some movie, but Mulder doesn’t know what one. The last movie Mulder saw was Office Space, over at Zito’s apartment, and that was six weeks ago. Maybe longer. He hasn’t really been keeping track.

Mulder stands, knocking into his chair and almost tipping it over before he catches it smoothly, his reflexes undulled by the night of drinking. He steps away from the table and tries not to notice Zito’s eyes following him as he crosses the bar, but he can feel Zito’s attention as clearly as a steady hand placed on his back.

It’s too loud in the short hallway where the payphones and restrooms are, the bar’s music pounding and echoing off the bulletin board fluttering with flyers and all the harshly ripped graffiti. It’s not even really music, just the slam of the drums, this huge heartbeat pulsing in the walls.

In the restroom, washing his hands, Mulder sees the door open in the mirror and watches the dark-haired man walk in.

The dark-haired man comes to the sink, letting his eyes meet Mulder’s in the scratched mirror, a slight tip of his head in acknowledgement, a ghost of Zito’s smile on his face. The dark-haired man makes a show of inspecting himself, smoothing down his hair, pulling out the wrinkles in his shirt, his gaze flickering back to Mulder’s over and over again, his eyes steady and predatory.

Mulder’s hands are wrapped around the lip of the sink, the muscles in his arms strung tight. He hears a hundred voices in his head, asking if he’s okay, asking why he isn’t okay, wondering what’s wrong, trying to help.

The dark-haired man reaches over casually, without a word, and hooks his fingers in Mulder’s belt, not pulling him closer, just holding his hand there like this is the most natural thing in the world, and his sharp eyes are daring Mulder to pull away.

Mulder breathes out, long and low, and whispers, “All right.”

The dark-haired man grins, Mulder’s heart buckling and stalling, and says, “Alley out back. Five minutes?” His voice is rougher than Mulder would have thought, deeper, something dark and brittle in his words.

Mulder nods, and he is thinking, ‘what the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck.’

It is risky and it is stupid and it isn’t anything he should do, he shouldn’t even be thinking about doing this, not here, not right out back, but he is so far beyond caring at this point, he is so far beyond.

The dark-haired man gives Mulder’s belt a little tug, and then slides his hand free, walking out without a single backwards glance, and Mulder doesn’t look at himself in the mirror again before he heads out, because he’s afraid of what he’ll see.

Back at the table, he pulls his light coat off the back of his chair and says, “Think I’m taking off.”

Chavez and Hatteberg look up at him blearily, but Zito’s eyes are clear and immediately shot with concern. “How come?” he asks, looking like he wants to stand, his hands hanging onto the edge of the table.

Mulder shrugs, tries not to look at Zito. “Just got real tired all of a sudden. I think the Stoli just hit me.”

Now Zito does stand, the other guys at the table looking at him in surprise. “Well, I’ll come . . . I’ll come wait with you while you get a cab.”

Mulder has to look away now, he can’t bear this, and he shakes his head. “No, it’s . . . it’s cool. I’ll . . . be okay,” and he knows that he would rather have Zito waiting with him for five minutes out on the curb than spend an entire sinister night with the dark-haired man, and he cannot believe he is pushing Zito away, he cannot believe he never asked Zito, he never asked him anything.

Zito is ready to protest, ready to insist, but Mulder says firmly, “I’ll see you guys tomorrow, okay?” The other guys nod and slur good-byes, and something sad and slow happens in Zito’s eyes, but he carefully sits down again, not taking his gaze off Mulder’s face, so Mulder leaves, as quick as he can.

Out the bar’s door, the muffled clutter of the city street, Mulder ducks down the side alley, snatching glances back and forth, no one seeming to notice him, the world going chill and shadowed and silent as he finds his way back, the alley nothing but broken asphalt and torn paper and twisted metal.

The dark-haired man is waiting there, back in the shadows, blending in with all the black, his hands pale as cobwebs. When Mulder gets close, he steps forward, and Mulder is able to see his eyes, clearer than in the bar, and they are the color of wet coal and stripped down, savage, brutal.

He is leaner than Mulder, but taut with strict muscle, beaten down, carved out of wood. Mulder can’t see much of Zito in this man’s face anymore, but he’s already made his choice.

They are face to face, and Mulder doesn’t think he’ll ask this man’s name, he doesn’t think he wants to know anything like that, doesn’t want to pretend that this is anything but what it is, this is what he’s been reduced to, a hard back alley with a man he doesn’t know, a man who doesn’t look much like Zito, after all, because Zito doesn’t have this harsh hunger in his eyes, something that looks more frayed and anarchic than desire.

The dark-haired man reaches forward with one hand, his other hand going to his back pocket, and Mulder begins to lean towards him, when suddenly the dark-haired man grips his collar and slams him backwards, the dark-haired man’s forearm choking across his throat, Mulder held down against the cracked brick wall, and there is a flash of silver, catching in the corner of his eye like lightning, and then the dark-haired man is holding a switchblade to the tender flesh under Mulder’s jaw, and the dark-haired man is not smiling now, his eyes gleeful but his face wrenched with mayhem, and the dark-haired man says in his scraping voice, “Your money, cocksucker.”

Mulder’s hands come up by instinct, all his power flooding through him, but before he can clench his hands around the dark-haired man’s arms and throw him off, the dark-haired man flattens the edge of the knife on Mulder’s throat, slashing a long skinny paper cut, and says in a terrible whisper, “Try it. Just fucking try it.”

Mulder swallows, his Adam’s apple nicked by the blade, and it is nothing worse than anything he has done to himself while shaving, but the dark-haired man is shuddering with violence, this fierce strength shivering through him, and Mulder is aware, with annihilating clarity, of how very close he is to being killed at this moment.

The dark-haired man tightens his arm against Mulder’s throat, Mulder choking, and demands, “Your fucking money!”

And Mulder hears his own voice, and he can’t believe it, his voice saying, “Fuck off, asshole.”

The dark-haired man’s eyes go wide, this little ring of white around the black, blood-shot and petrifying, and he snarls, “You think I won’t do it? You think you’re getting out of this, motherfucker? Give me your goddamned money or I’ll fucking kill you where you stand, you fucking faggot.”

And Mulder isn’t thinking about anything, his mind swept clear, a clean white field, he is feeling the bite of the blade, the burn of each breath, the scratch of the rough bricks under his shoulders, the stuttering force of the dark-haired man, and he is waiting for terror to sweep through him, he is waiting for fight-or-flight, he is waiting for self-preservation, but none of it comes, none of it.

Mulder is blank and he will be dead in a moment, he will be dead for no reason, his heart battering to a stop, oil-dark blood on the pavement, he will be dead in a moment, left alone in an alley, this broken place that it took him so long to get to, and Mulder is blank for a long still stretch of time, watching the dark-haired man’s face twist with rage, and then out of nowhere Mulder hears Zito in his head, saying, “Mulder, fuck, don’t go.”

And Mulder’s whole mind is a blast of light, and his body rushes with strength, and he braces, ready to fight his way back, ready to do anything, anything, but before he can move, there is something fast blurring in the corner of his eye, and then the dark-haired man is suddenly torn off him, the switchblade snatched away, and there is the rough thumping sound of bodies hitting the pavement, and then the most unbelievable thing, Zito’s voice, terrified and raw, “Don’t touch him, don’t you fucking touch him.”

Mulder, one hand to his throat, turns and there is Zito, on his knees on the asphalt, his hand fisted in the dark-haired man’s shirt, dragging him up and hitting him, the short fierce arc of his arm, the dull crack of his fist slamming into the man’s face, the knife skittering out of his hand, clattering across the stone, the dark-haired man’s face smeared with blood, his eyes half-open.

Zito is not a fighter, has never been, he does not know how to use his hands to hurt another person, but right now, right now, he is wild and insane, and what he lacks in finesse, he makes up for in pure fear, pure fury, fighting like his life depends on it.

Then, his hand still clenched in the dark-haired man’s shirt, Zito suddenly snaps his head around, looking for Mulder, and when he sees him, staring back at him in shock, Zito’s raised fist falters, and he whispers Mulder’s name, too low to be heard, his eyes huge, and he lets the dark-haired man go, letting him slump back on the ground, and Zito cannot take his eyes off Mulder, but then, Mulder cannot take his eyes off Zito.

The dark-haired man scrambles, tearing his hands bloody on the asphalt, and he stumbles to his feet, taking off down the alley, into the darkness.

They are motionless for an eternity, just staring at each other, and Mulder thinks desperately that somehow this moment is more dangerous than any that came before it.

He moves forward slowly, drifting, hazy and unsure, and he stops in front of Zito, Zito still down on his knees before him, and Zito’s eyes are halogen-bright as he whispers, his voice hitching, “I came to find you.”

Something crashes down inside Mulder, and he is reaching out, grabbing Zito’s hand, hauling him up into a crushing embrace, wrapping his arms around Zito as tight as they will go, feeling Zito’s ribs beneath his palms, burying his face in Zito’s shoulder, and Zito is holding onto him, and they are both shaking, they are both shaking so hard.

For awhile Mulder is blind, his eyes hidden, his breath drawn through Zito’s body, and the only thing he knows is that this is Zito, in his arms, like Zito is the only true thing in the world, Zito gasping against his neck, Zito’s hair brushing his face, Zito’s long fingers curving around his sides.

It is everything he has ever felt, all at once, terror and shock and joy and despair, and it is something he has never felt before, something fresh and new, like everything has fallen apart, everything has broken down to this impossible moment, and now they will have to start over at the beginning and re-invent the world.

And Mulder is thinking, ‘thank god, thank god.’

At some point Zito tightens his hands on Mulder’s body and asks, his voice shivering with relief and anger, “What the fuck were you doing with him? Why’d you come back here with some random fucking psychopath?”

Mulder shakes his head, the movement rolling against Zito’s body, and mumbles, “Didn’t know he was a psychopath. Thought he was . . . he just . . . he reminded me of you.”

Because now maybe Mulder owes Zito everything, maybe Zito will be responsible for him forever, so at least he should tell Zito the truth. At this moment, Mulder doesn’t think he remembers how to lie, because right now the truth is all he knows.

Zito pulls his head up, meeting Mulder’s gaze, and Zito’s face is amazed, and finally Mulder has told him, finally there can be no more pretending that this is anything other than what it is.

Zito stares at him for a long moment, and then says hoarsely, “Crazy guy with a knife reminded you of me? Thanks a lot, dude.”

And Mulder laughs, it is such an incredible thing for Zito to say, and he laughs, muffled with Zito’s shirt in his mouth, and he laughs until fierce tears burn in his eyes, damp fingerprints on the skin of Zito’s neck.

Zito slides his hands up, feeling the flicker of Mulder’s body as the laughter tapers off, and when Mulder has fallen quiet and trembling again, Zito flattens his hands on Mulder’s back and whispers roughly, “Don’t ever do that again. Scared me so bad. You want me, you come get me, okay. Don’t ever do that again, man, please.”

Mulder chokes back something that might be a sob and nods, his cheek pressed against Zito’s neck, the thin slide of their skin across each other, and he won’t do it again, not ever again, because he doesn’t want to be that man again, he doesn’t want to be anyone who scares Zito, not ever again.

They are shaking in each other’s arms for a long time, the shudders spurring them together, their hearts doing battle through their fragile cages of bone, as the adrenaline sinks away, as Mulder relearns how to breathe, how to be still.

Eventually, after a thousand unknowable seconds flick by like cigarettes in the night, Zito lifts his head, tilts just slightly away to look at Mulder, his half-shrouded gaze suddenly stricken with fear again, Mulder’s arms tightening instinctively around him, and Zito stutters, “Your . . . your neck, Mulder. You’re bleeding, you’re hurt.”

Mulder breathes out, and tells him, “I’m okay,” because he is, for the first time in so long.

Zito shakes his head, his hair falling soft across his forehead, and he slips one hand around Mulder’s body, never losing contact as he trips his fingers up Mulder’s chest, fumbling in his shirt, climbing over the buttons, his fingers feathering on the hollows at the base of Mulder’s throat, clumsy over the solid lines of Mulder’s collarbone, delicately touching the thread of blood, pinpricks of red on his fingertips, and Zito stares at his hand, his eyes broken.

Then Zito looks up, half his face in shadow, a slash of light cutting across his mouth, and Zito searches for something in Mulder’s face, his hand closing gently in Mulder’s shirt, and Zito must find what he’s looking for, because he swallows and ducks his head down, nosing his way carefully, and draws his tongue lightly across the skinny shallow cut on Mulder’s throat.

Mulder gasps, his eyes pulling shut, his hands clenching hard enough on Zito to leave bruises. There is a brief sting, and then nothing but this deep warmth, this long slow heat, flaring through his whole body, Zito’s hand drifting up to the back of his neck to hold him still, Zito so careful with him, like he’s something precarious, something precious, Zito’s mouth moving tenderly, soothing away all the pain Mulder has ever known.

Zito softly kisses the dent where Mulder’s pulse is racing, then kisses the calm spot just under Mulder’s jaw, then kisses the corner of Mulder’s mouth, and there is a airless moment that lasts forever, before Zito kisses Mulder, at last, finally, at the end of everything, Zito’s hand opening on the back of Mulder’s neck, his palm flat, his fingers spread out.

Everything shudders to a stop, and then Mulder is kissing Zito, breathing into him, moving slow, Zito tasting sweet and endless, Mulder’s hand rising to Zito’s face, slipping through his hair, and it is dark and light, at the same time, it is the past and the future, it is right now, it is like getting lost, like never wanting to be found.

They shift carefully against each other, trying this out, finding the right angle, fitting together, like they have been practicing for this their whole lives, like this is where they were always supposed to be.

When they pull away, Mulder can still taste Zito, knows precisely the texture and flavor of Zito’s mouth, and he can feel Zito’s tight exhalations falling on his lips, brief and hot on his flushed skin.

They stare at each other in shock for a moment, like the stunned light of the full moon has exploded behind their eyes, and then Zito says, his voice rasping, “Come on. We’re going home.”

And he takes Mulder’s hand and pulls him out of there, and there is nothing in the world that has prepared Mulder for this moment, nothing ever could.

* * *

They do not speak the whole way back to Zito’s place, Zito’s hand holding onto his wrist in the cab, and this is the only way they are touching, just Zito’s fingertips resting on the smooth tendons.

Mulder watches the city flood by, chaotic and running together, the colors melting one into another, until everything has become one long streak of light, and this is what has become of Mulder’s heart, too, it has passed light speed, it is moving too fast to be seen, it is arcing through the stars.

Somewhere he’s never been before, somewhere he recognizes in an instant.

In the elevator up to Zito’s apartment, they stand two feet apart and don’t look at each other, but when Mulder sneaks a glance over at Zito, he can see that the other man’s hands are still shaking, so Mulder reaches out and touches the hollow of Zito’s wrist, just barely with the tips of his fingers, because this is the kind of touch that Zito used to heal him, and maybe it works both ways.

Mulder hears Zito breathe out a quiet sigh, sees Zito’s eyes pull shut, and Mulder thinks that maybe he’s not the only one who’s been going crazy.

It takes Zito awhile to get the key to turn, having trouble, probably because Mulder is standing close behind him, Mulder’s chest just brushing Zito’s shoulder, and Zito keeps darting glances his way, and Mulder wants to drop his head, wants to hide his face in Zito’s neck, wants to wrap his arms around the other man, but if he does that, they will never get inside.

Once they are in the apartment, Zito looks at him for a long moment in the flat shadows of the hallway, Zito’s hand still on the doorknob, and then Zito drops his keys on the floor, the high glittering ring of the metal hitting the wood, and Zito grabs him and kisses him fast, holding Mulder’s head in his hands, wild and hard and filthy, drawing Mulder’s tongue into his mouth, leaving Mulder gasping, but before he can drag Zito to him and do something unspeakable to him on the carpet of the hallway, Zito pulls away, quick as he came, looking surprised at his own behavior for a second before he fists a hand in Mulder’s shirt and pulls him down the hallway.

In Zito’s bedroom, Mulder is suddenly nervous, but Zito takes his time, his eyes calm and bright. It is momentary and struggling with shadows, and Zito unbuttons Mulder’s shirt slowly, his fingertips tracing intricate patterns, writing code.

Zito smooths his palm down Mulder’s bare chest, making Mulder shiver. There are bruises on Zito’s knuckles, out of place on his kind hands, and Mulder carefully touches Zito’s hand on his chest, like he can rub away the darkness. Zito breathes deep, pulling himself under control and says, his voice low, “You should have told me. You should have asked.”

Mulder nods, the muscles in his stomach flickering under Zito’s hand as it moves, his breath fast and short. “I know. I just . . . I didn’t know how.”

Zito shakes his head, stripping Mulder’s shirt off his arms, trailing his hands over Mulder’s shoulders, back down his chest. “All you ever had to do was ask.”

Mulder almost died tonight, but he thinks he might be more scared at this moment than he was with a switchblade at his throat. Zito leans in and kisses Mulder’s collarbone, the ridge of the old fracture, his hands tracking the paths of Mulder’s body, over the baseball scars, the fighting scars, the scars he has no explanation for, Zito learning the landmarks, discovering the best way.

Mulder hooks his arm around Zito’s waist, Zito lowering his cheek to Mulder’s bare shoulder, his breath just beginning to pull raggedly, Zito’s fingers lined up on one of Mulder’s ribs, and Mulder says, his voice cracking, “I didn’t . . . I wanted to, but it’s . . . I tear people down. I ruin everything I touch. I didn’t want to do that to you, I never want to do that to you.”

Zito is warm against him, this almost-embrace, his shirt chafing on Mulder’s skin. He doesn’t smile but Mulder can see it anyway, because whenever he looks at Zito, he can see the other man smiling.

Zito’s mouth is on Mulder’s shoulder, and Mulder can feel his lips moving as Zito tells him quietly, “All the things that have happened, anything that’s ever happened, whatever bad you’ve done, it doesn’t matter. Because it was all leading up to this.”

His whole life.

Mulder is thinking of all the way the hell back whens, the memories, the stories he tells people and the ones he doesn’t tell anyone, Mulder is thinking of being young, of growing up, he is thinking about how he got to this unimaginable moment, and he knows that this is the way it had to be, the only way it could have been, because you have to live before you can figure out what there is that’s worth being alive for.

Mulder is thinking of everything that runs beneath, under the surface, and maybe it makes sense now, maybe he finally understands.

He tugs up Zito’s T-shirt, Zito lifting his arms to let Mulder slip it over his head, mussing up his hair, and Mulder is briefly uncertain, baffled by this sudden license to see and touch and taste, but when he hesitantly brushes his lips against Zito’s neck, Zito sighs and tightens his arms around Mulder’s shoulders, making Mulder brave.

Mulder’s fingertips are resting on Zito’s chest, the perfect beat of his heart, and Mulder whispers, “You’re who I was meant to find.”

And this is something he knows for sure.

THE END


End file.
